“Yes, m’m.”

“Where is his surgery?”

“Well, m’m, he did live just opposite, with Dr. Harrop, but latterly he’s gone to live at Bleakridge.”

“I wish you would put your things on, and run up there and ask him to call as soon as he can.”

“I will, m’m,” said Amy, with the greatest willingness.  “I thought I heard missis cry out.”  She was not effusive.  She was better than effusive:  kindly and helpful with a certain reserve.

“There’s something about that woman I like,” said Sophia, to herself.  For a proved fool, Amy was indeed holding her own rather well.

Dr. Stirling drove down about two o’clock.  He had now been established in the Five Towns for more than a decade, and the stamp of success was on his brow and on the proud forehead of his trotting horse.  He had, in the phrase of the Signal, ’identified himself with the local life of the district.’  He was liked, being a man of broad sympathies.  In his rich Scotch accent he could discuss with equal ability the flavour of whisky or of a sermon, and he had more than sufficient tact never to discuss either whiskies or sermons in the wrong place.  He had made a speech (responding for the learned professions) at the annual dinner of the Society for the Prosecution of Felons, and this speech (in which praise of red wine was rendered innocuous by praise of books—­his fine library was notorious) had classed him as a wit with the American consul, whose post-prandial manner was modelled on Mark Twain’s.  He was thirty-five years of age, tall and stoutish, with a chubby boyish face that the razor left chiefly blue every morning.

The immediate effect of his arrival on Constance was miraculous.  His presence almost cured her for a moment, just as though her malady had been toothache and he a dentist.  Then, when he had finished his examination, the pain resumed its sway over her.

In talking to her and to Sophia, he listened very seriously to all that they said; he seemed to regard the case as the one case that had ever aroused his genuine professional interest; but as it unfolded itself, in all its difficulty and urgency, so he seemed, in his mind, to be discovering wondrous ways of dealing with it; these mysterious discoveries seemed to give him confidence, and his confidence was communicated to the patient by means of faint sallies of humour.  He was a highly skilled doctor.  This fact, however, had no share in his popularity; which was due solely to his rare gift of taking a case very seriously while remaining cheerful.

He said he would return in a quarter of an hour, and he returned in thirteen minutes with a hypodermic syringe, with which he attacked the pain in its central strongholds.

“What is it?” asked Constance, breathing gratitude for the relief.

He paused, looking at her roguishly from under lowered eyelids.

“I’d better not tell ye,” he said.  “It might lead ye into mischief.”