The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he treated with cruel bluntness. “No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight of the left eye.” “You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked Theodore piteously. “The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly. “There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?” Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance-- “My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now. She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!” The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have to look hard before they see much. “You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly. Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in the background, confessed-- “Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to take me at my word.” Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken him at his word. The doctor nodded. “I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well, then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody else who would come to nurse you.” “I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background. It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was far more cordial. He told Bram he was doing a fine thing. “But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.” And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.