"Are you a doctor, sir?" said the old man, looking at his visitor with a benevolent smile. "Grand profession. I should have liked to have been a doctor. But is not that a very vague description? Names are so useful for distinguishing one person, place, or thing, from another. But it was in this street, you say?" "Well--er--no, I am not sure," said Chester, hurriedly. "Dear me! that is rather perplexing," said the old man, taking off his spectacles and beginning to wipe them upon the tail of his dressing-gown. "But," he added, as if relieved, "the Directory would be of no use if you do not know the name." "None whatever," said Chester, who was smarting with the thought that this pleasant old gentleman must take him for a lunatic. "Pray forgive me for troubling you in this unceremonious way." "Oh, not at all, my dear sir, not at all. I have so few visitors, though," he added, "as you see I am surrounded by old friends." "The same style of house--the same sort of hall," thought Chester, as he went out after a few more words had been exchanged. "Could it have been in this street?" He looked up sharply at a heavy-faced butler and a tall, smart, powdered-headed footman, who were standing at the door of the next house, doing nothing, with the air of two men whose employers were out. Chester looked eagerly at them and passed by, but the door was nearly closed, and he could not see inside. His sharp look was returned with interest, the two men evidently expecting him to come up the steps and address them, but he went on for a short distance in an undecided way, thinking deeply, and trying hard to see through the mental mist which shut him in. But a short time before he had felt convinced that he had found the house and been disappointed; now he felt quite as sure that the mansion where the two servants were standing must be the place. He had no special reason for coming to the conclusion, but all the same a curious feeling of attraction made him slacken his pace, angry and annoyed the while that he had not stopped and spoken to the men. "Great heavens! What a vacillating moral coward I have grown," he said to himself. "What would have been easier?" He said this but felt that the task was terribly hard, for it seemed such a childish thing to do--to go about asking folk if that was the house where some people lived who had fetched him to attend a man who had been shot, and kept him a prisoner for days and days before drugging him and having him shut up in a cab to be driven about in the middle of the night.