"Don't you speak so confidently, Johnny Ludlow," reproved Mr. Brandon. "We shall find more the matter with Roger than a broken arm; take my word for that. He has been on the wrong tack this long while. A broken arm would not cause him to hide himself--and that's what he must have been doing." "Some of those hospital students are a wild lot--as I have heard," said the Squire. Mr. Brandon nodded in answer. "When Roger came from Hampshire to enter on his studies at St. Bartholomew's, he was as pure-hearted, well-intentioned a young fellow as had ever been trained by an anxious mother"--and Mr. Brandon poured a drop more weak tea out of his own tea-pot to cover his emotion. "Fit for heaven, one might have thought: any way, had been put in the road that leads to it. Loose, reckless companions got hold of him, and dragged him down to their evil ways." Breakfast over, little time was lost in starting to find out Gibraltar Terrace. The cab soon took us to it. Roger had been lying there more than a week. Hastening up that way one evening, on leaving the hospital, to call upon a fellow-student, he was knocked down by a fleet hansom rounding the corner of Gibraltar Terrace. Pitt the doctor happened to be passing at the time, and had him carried into the nearest house: one he had attended patients in before. The landlady, Mrs. Mapping, showed us upstairs. (And she, poor faded woman, turned out to have been known to the Squire in the days long gone by, when she was pretty little Dorothy Grape. But I have told her story already, and there's no need to allude to it again.) Roger lay in bed, in a small back-room on the first-floor; a mild, fair, pleasant-looking young man with a white bandage round his head. Mr. Pitt explained that the arm was not absolutely broken, but so much contused and inflamed as to be a worse hurt. This would not have kept him in bed, however, but the head had also been damaged, and fever set in. "So this is where he has lain, hiding, while I have been ransacking London for him!" remarked Mr. Brandon, who was greatly put out by the whole affair; and perhaps the word "hiding" might have more truth in it than even he suspected. "When young Scott called last night--a fellow-student of your nephew's who comes to see him and bring him changes of clothes from his lodgings--he said you were making inquiries at the hospital and had left your address," explained Pitt. "So I thought I ought to write to you, sir." "And I am much obliged to you for doing it, and for your care of him also," said Mr. Brandon. And presently, when Pitt was leaving, he followed him downstairs to Mrs. Mapping's parlour, to ask whether Roger was in danger. "I do not apprehend any, now that the fever is subsiding," answered Pitt. "I can say almost surely that none will arise if we can only keep him quiet. That has been the difficulty throughout--his restlessness. It is just as though he had something on his mind."