“Oh, but you must tell me, doctor,” Constance insisted, anxious that he should live up to his reputation for Sophia’s benefit.

“It’s hydrochloride of cocaine,” he said, and lifted a finger.  “Beware of the cocaine habit.  It’s ruined many a respectable family.  But if I hadn’t had a certain amount of confidence in yer strength of character, Mrs. Povey, I wouldn’t have risked it.”

“He will have his joke, will the doctor!” Constance smiled, in a brighter world.

He said he should come again about half-past five, and he arrived about half-past six, and injected more cocaine.  The special importance of the case was thereby established.  On this second visit, he and Sophia soon grew rather friendly.  When she conducted him downstairs again he stopped chatting with her in the parlour for a long time, as though he had nothing else on earth to do, while his coachman walked the horse to and fro in front of the door.

His attitude to her flattered Sophia, for it showed that he took her for no ordinary woman.  It implied a continual assumption that she must be a mine of interest for any one who was privileged to delve into her memory.  So far, among Constance’s acquaintance, Sophia had met no one who showed more than a perfunctory curiosity as to her life.  Her return was accepted with indifference.  Her escapade of thirty years ago had entirely lost its dramatic quality.  Many people indeed had never heard that she had run away from home to marry a commercial traveller; and to those who remembered, or had been told, it seemed a sufficiently banal exploit—­after thirty years!  Her fear, and Constance’s, that the town would be murmurous with gossip was ludicrously unfounded.  The effect of time was such that even Mr. Critchlow appeared to have forgotten even that she had been indirectly responsible for her father’s death.  She had nearly forgotten it herself; when she happened to think of it she felt no shame, no remorse, seeing the death as purely accidental, and not altogether unfortunate.  On two points only was the town inquisitive:  as to her husband, and as to the precise figure at which she had sold the pension.  The town knew that she was probably not a widow, for she had been obliged to tell Mr. Critchlow, and Mr. Critchlow in some hour of tenderness had told Maria.  But nobody had dared to mention the name of Gerald Scales to her.  With her fashionable clothes, her striking mien of command, and the legend of her wealth, she inspired respect, if not awe, in the townsfolk.  In the doctor’s attitude there was something of amaze; she felt it.  Though the dull apathy of the people she had hitherto met was assuredly not without its advantageous side for her tranquillity of mind, it had touched her vanity, and the gaze of the doctor soothed the smart.  He had so obviously divined her interestingness; he so obviously wanted to enjoy it.

“I’ve just been reading Zola’s ‘Downfall,’” he said.