"Oh, I know it is not to be done yet. We shall have to want a little longer. I believe it was that insufferable woman, Mrs. Tolman, put it into my head. She actually told me that we ought to move, as no good class of patients would ever come to Galvaston Terrace. It was just like her impudence--eh, Livy?" "Oh, Marcus, I am so sorry," and Olivia put down her work and looked at him sympathetically. "I thought something had annoyed you the moment you came in. It is too bad of Mrs. Tolman always to tread upon people's corns in this fashion. She might wait until one asks her advice." "Oh, but it is true, all the same," he returned, with a tinge of despondency in his voice. "A good house in a good neighbourhood would make all the difference to the practice. A house in Brunswick Place, for example." But Olivia only laughed. "Someone besides myself can build air-castles," she said, archly. "You might as well go on, Marcus. Why not be Dr. Bevan's partner, too?" Then Marcus started, and an odd little smile played round his mouth. The very same thought had already occurred to him. CHAPTER XIX. DAME FORTUNE SMILES. "Of pleasures, those which occur most rarely give the greatest pleasure."--_Epictetus_. Dr. Luttrell's fit of pessimism did not last long. The very next day he had a sharp twinge of remorse, when he went round to Galvaston House to take leave of his patient, and Mr. Gaythorne put a slip of folded paper in his hand. "I am an old man," he said,--and his thin fingers held the young doctor's hand in a firm grasp,--"and I am using an old man's privilege. I know what a hard, up-hill fight life is at present to you, and I should like to ease the burden a little," and to Marcus's intense and overwhelming surprise he found it was a cheque for five hundred pounds. Marcus never could remember what he said, but his first attempt to stammer a few words of gratitude for this unexpected and magnificent gift was promptly checked. "It is all very well," observed Alwyn rather gloomily when Olivia told him of his father's munificence. She had shed tears of joy when Marcus had shown her the cheque. "My father has settled up accounts with Dr. Luttrell after his own fashion, but he has not paid my debts." And then in a deeply moved voice, "There are some debts that cannot be paid. 'I was a stranger and ye took me in.' How many doors do you suppose, Mrs. Luttrell, would have opened to a starving outcast that Christmas night?" and then his blue eyes flashed with an expression of intense feeling that became him well. "I shall never be able to repay either of you. I shall never try," he went on. "Do you know, as I lay on that doorstep too weak and stiff to move, and the doctor bent over me, it seemed to me, in my dazed condition, as though it were the face of a beneficent angel. God bless you both, for you have made a man of me." And then he lifted the kind, womanly hand to his lips.