The two doctors saw a cab waiting at the mouth of the alley, and they found Cyril Culverhouse standing in the doorway of the house that sheltered the Joyces. They all three went in together. Two hours’ later Cyril came out of that crowded den, very pale, and leaning on the parish doctor’s arm. The two medical men had insisted upon his taking a glass of brandy, and reposing for some time in a horizontal position. The operation had been performed with every indication of success. Dr. Bolling was remaining to watch the patient. He was going to stay all night. Nobody knew better than Dr. Bolling’s gratis patients whether or not the physician was a miser. He was no niggard either of his time or his money when their welfare was at stake. He would give as much attention to the case of a pauper infant--a little half-fledged life that was positively valueless from the political economist’s point of view--as he would have given to a hypochondriacal duchess. Mr. Saunders accompanied Cyril home to his lodgings, comfortable rooms in a queer old panelled house in a narrow street shadowed by the gloomy stone wall of the parish church. The rooms Cyril occupied were large, tidily furnished in an old-fashioned heterogeneous way, and scrupulously clean. The landlady was what is usually called a motherly person, which seems to mean a woman whose easy temper has run into fat. She had let her lodgings to curates for the last thirty years, her husband, as parish clerk, having a vested right to church patronage. She was of a soft and affectionate nature, and, not being blessed with children of her own, lavished all her maternal feeling upon the beardless, or newly bearded youths who succeeded one another, in an endless procession, as occupants of her roomy first floor. Lively curates had objected to the gloom of the dusky old panelled rooms, with their deep window-seats and narrow windows. Aristocratic curates had felt their personal dignity endangered by the shabbiness of this narrow side street; but no curate had ever been able to resist the insinuations of Mrs. Podmore’s maternal affection. They might complain, but they could not leave her. She shed tears at the least hint of such a desertion, and what curate, rightly minded, could resist a woman’s tears?