And yet, she felt she would rather not have asked it.

CHAPTER XI

From this retreat, Irene wrote to her cousin Olga Hannaford, and in the course of the letter made inquiry whether anything was known at Ewell about a severe illness that had befallen young Mr. Otway.  Olga replied that she had heard of no such event; that they had received no news at all of Mr. Otway since his leaving England.  This did not allay an uneasiness which, in various forms, had troubled Irene ever since she heard that her studious acquaintance had abandoned his ambitions and gone back to commerce.  A few weeks more elapsed, and —­being now in Scotland—­she received a confirmation of what Arnold Jacks had reported.  Immediately on reaching Odessa, Piers Otway had fallen ill, and for a time was in danger.  Irene mused.  She would have preferred not to think of Otway at all, but often did so, and could not help it.  A certain reproach of conscience connected itself with his name.  But as time went on, and it appeared that the young man was settled to his mercantile career in Russia, she succeeded in dismissing him from her mind.

For the next three years she lived with her father in London; a life pretty evenly divided between studies and the amusements of her world.

Dr. Derwent pursued his quiet activity.  In a certain sphere he had reputation; the world at large knew little or nothing of him.  All he aimed at was the diminution of human suffering; whether men thanked him for his life’s labour did not seem to him a point worth considering.  He knew that only his scientific brethren could gauge the advance in knowledge, and consequent power over disease, due to his patient toil; it was a question of minute discoveries, of investigations unintelligible to the layman.  Some of his colleagues held that he foolishly restricted himself in declining to experimentalise in corpore vili, whenever such experiments were attended with pain; he was spoken of in some quarters as a “sentimentalist,” a man who might go far but for his “fads.”  One great pathologist held that the whole idea of pursuing science for mitigation of human ills was nothing but a sentimentality and a fad.  A debate between this personage and Dr. Derwent was brought to a close by the latter’s inextinguishable mirth.  He was, indeed, a man who laughed heartily, and laughter often served him where another would have waxed choleric.

“Only a dog!” he exclaimed once to Irene, apropos of this subject, and being in his graver mood.  “Why, what assurance have I that any given man is of more importance to the world than any given dog?  How can I know what is important and what is not, when it comes to the ultimate mystery of life?  Create me a dog—­just a poor little mongrel puppy—­and you shall torture him; then, and not till then.  And in that event I reserve my opinion of the——­” He checked himself on the point of a remark which seemed of too wide bearing for the girl’s ears.  Hut Irene supplied the hiatus for herself, as she was beginning to do pretty often when listening to her father.