When the door was shut, and Globus was left alone with his patient, a solemn, sagacious expression stole over the worthy doctor’s face. He had long been the personal friend of Mrs. Kettering, as well as “her own medical man”; and although he would probably have felt it more had he not been called in professionally, yet it was with a heavy heart and a desponding brow that he confessed to himself there was little or no hope. He had put in practice all that skill and experience suggested--he had sent for a brother physician of high local repute, and now there was nothing more to be done save to wait for the result; so the kind-hearted man sat himself down in the chair Blanche had so lately occupied, and pondered over the many changing years, now like a dream, during which he had known that life which in yonder bed was dribbling out its few remaining sands. He remembered her the merry, black-eyed girl (once he thought her eyes brighter than those of Mrs. Globus); he saw her again the sparkling bride, the good-humoured matron, the doting mother, the not inconsolable widow. It was only yesterday he bowed to her on the parade, and thought how young she looked with her grown-up daughter; he was to have dined with them to-morrow; and the uncertainty of life looked him startlingly in the face. But the pride of science soon came to the rescue, and the practised healer forgot his private feelings in his professional reflections. And thus Dr. Globus passed his holiday--one afternoon of the precious fourteen, in which he had promised himself the fresh breezes and the out-of-doors liberty of St. Swithin’s. Mrs. Globus and the children were picking up shells on the beach; his brother, whom he had not seen for ten years, was coming to dinner; but the doctor’s time is the property of the suffering and the doomed, and still Globus sat and watched and calculated, and saw clearly that Mrs. Kettering must die.