Mr. Brooke dined at six o'clock, then smoked a cigar and had a cup of black coffee brought to him in the untidy little sanctum where he generally did his work. With the coffee came the black kitten, which sidled up to him on the table, purring, and rubbing her head against his arm as if she knew him for a friend. He stroked it occasionally as he read his evening papers, and stroked it in the caressing way which cats love, from its forehead to the tip of its stumpy tail. It was while he was thus engaged that a tap at the door was heard, and the tap was followed by the entrance of a young man, who looked as if he were quite at home. "Can I come in?" he said, in a perfunctory sort of way; and then, without waiting for any reply, went on--"I've no engagement to-night, so I thought I would look in here first, and see whether you had started." "All right. Where have you been?" "Special meeting--Church and State Union," said the young man with a smile. "I went partly in a medical capacity, partly because I was curious to know how they managed to unite the two professions." "Couldn't your sister tell you?" "Oh, I don't allow Ethel to attend such mixed gatherings," said the visitor, seating himself on the edge of the library table, and beginning to play with the cat. "You are unusually particular," said Mr. Brooke, with an amused look. But Maurice Kenyon, as the visitor was named, continued to attract the kitten's notice, without the answering protest which Caspar Brooke had expected. Maurice Kenyon was nearly thirty, and had stepped by good fortune into the shoes of a medical uncle who had left him a large and increasing general practice in the West Central district. The young man's popularity was not entirely owing to his skill, although he had an exceedingly good repute among his brethren in medicine. Neither was it attributable to good looks. He owed it rather to a sympathetic manner, to the cheerful candor of his dark grey eyes, to the mixture of firmness and delicate kindness by which his treatment of his patients was characterized. He was especially successful in his dealings with children; and he had therefore a good deal of adoration from grateful mothers to put up with. But of his skill and intellectual power there could be no doubt; and these qualities, coupled with his winning manner, bade fair to raise him to a very high place in his profession.