Miss Bethune rose hurriedly from her seat, and made a turn about the room with an air of high excitement and almost passion. Then she came and stood before the fire, leaning on the mantelpiece, looking down upon the blaze with a face that seemed to be coloured by the reflection. Finally, she put out a long arm, caught Gilchrist by the shoulders, who stood softly crying, as was her wont, within reach, and drew her close. “You’ve been with me through it all,” she said suddenly; “there’s nobody that knows me but you. Whatever you say, it’s you only that knows what is in my heart. I bear you no ill-will for any word you say, no’ for any word you say; and the Lord forgive me if maybe all this time it is you that has been right and me that has been wrong!” Only a moment, scarcely so much, Miss Bethune leant her head upon Gilchrist’s shoulder, then she suddenly pushed her away. And not a second too soon, for at that moment a knock came to the door. They both started a little; and Miss Bethune, with the speed of thought, returned to the chair shaded by a screen from the lamplight and firelight in which she had been sitting, “not in good spirits,” at the time of the interruption of Dora. “Go and see who it is,” she said, half in words, half by the action of her hand. Nothing could have been more instantaneous than this rapid change. When Gilchrist, scarcely less rapid though so much heavier than her mistress, opened the door, there stood before it a little man very carefully dressed, though in morning costume, in a solemn frock coat, with his hat in his hand. Though professional costume no longer exists among us, it was impossible not to feel and recognise in a moment that nothing but a medical man, a doctor to the tips of his fingers, could have appeared in just that perfect neatness of dress, so well brushed, so exactly buttoned, so gravely clothed in garments which, though free of any peculiarity of art or colour, such as that which distinguishes the garb of a clergyman, were yet so completely and seriously professional. His whiskers, for it was in the days when these ornaments were still worn, his hair, brown, with a slight crisp and upturning, like lining, of grey, the watch-chain that crossed his waistcoat, as well as the accurate chronometer of a watch to which so many eager and so many languid pulses had beat, were all in perfect keeping; even his boots--but we must not pursue too far this discussion of Dr. Roland’s personal appearance. His boots were not the polished leather of the evening; but they were the spotless boots of a man who rarely walked, and whose careful step from his carriage to a patient’s door never carried in any soil of the outside to the most delicate carpet. Why, being one of the inhabitants of this same house in Bloomsbury, he should have carried his hat in his hand when he came to the door of Miss Bethune’s drawing-room from his own sitting-room downstairs, is a mystery upon which I can throw no light.