“But consumption does not spare even the cream of society, doctor. It appears he must have had warning of the coming danger, for he seems to have got away.” “I thought as much!” said Dr. Beaton. “I never expected to see more of him after-- Oh, I thought as much!” John Trevanion eyed the doctor with a look that was almost threatening, but he said nothing more. Dr. Beaton, too, was on the eve of departure; his occupation was gone, and his _tête-à-tête_ with John Trevanion not very agreeable to either of them. But the parting was friendly on all sides. “The doctor do express himself very nicely,” Dorrington said, when he joined the company in the housekeeper’s room, after having solemnly served the two gentlemen at dinner, “about his stay having been agreeable and all that--just what a gentleman ought to say. There are medical men of all kinds, just as there are persons of all sorts in domestic service; and the doctor, he’s one of the right sort.” “And a comfort, whatever ailed one, to know there was a doctor in the house, and as you’d be right done by,” the housekeeper said, which was the general view in the servants’ hall. These regions were, as may be supposed, deeply agitated. Russell, one of the most important among them, had been sent forth weeping and vituperating, and the sudden departure of the family had left the household free to make every commentary, possible and impossible. Needless to say that Madam’s disappearance had but one explanation among them. In all circles the question would have been so decided by the majority; in the servants’ hall there was unanimity; no one was bold enough to make a different suggestion, and had it been made it would have been laughed to scorn. There were various stories told about her supposed lover, and several different suppositions current. Gentlemen of different appearances had been seen about the park by different spectators, and men in careful disguises had even been admitted into the house, some were certain. That new man who came to wind the clocks! Why should a new man have been sent? And he had white hands, altogether unlike the hands of one who worked for his living. The young man who had lived at the Red Lion was not left out of the suspicions of the house, but he had not so important a place there as he had in the mind, for example, of Dr. Beaton, who had, with grief and pain, but now not without a certain satisfaction, concluded upon his identity. The buzz and talk, and the whirl of suppositions and real or imaginary evidence, made a sort of reverberation through the house. Now and then, when doors were open and the household off their guard, which, occurred not unfrequently in the extraordinary calm and leisure, the sounds of the eager voices were heard even as far as the library, in which John Trevanion sat with his papers, and sometimes elicited from him a furious message full of bitterness and wrath. “Can’t you keep your subordinates quiet and your