Dr Dudley rose to his feet, and kicked a footstool across the room. You would scarcely have recognised his face as the one that had smiled at Mona across the counter. The wind played on his nerves as if they had been an instrument, but he was not thinking of the storm. "Three years more before I can begin to do a man's work in the world," he said, "and nearly thirty lie behind me! It is enough to make one make tracks for the gold-fields to-morrow. What surety have I that all my life won't drift, drift, drift away, as the last thirty years have done? Upon my soul"--he drew up the blind and looked out on the darkness, which only threw back his image and that of the room--"I envy the poor devils who are called out to their patients in this tempest, for shilling or half-crown fees!" He was young, you see, but not very young; for, instead of indulging in further heroics, he bit his lip and returned to his books and papers. "_Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika!_" He drew down his brows, and read aloud from the mighty tome at his side, stopping now and then to add a few lines to the diagram before him. He held very strongly that, in addition to practical work, which was wellnigh everything, there was only one way of mastering anything approaching an exact science. Firstly, get the best handbook extant; secondly, read the diagrams only; thirdly, read the diagrams, letterpress and all; fourthly, read letterpress alone, constructing your own diagrams as you go. "For after all," he said, "another man's diagrams are but crutches at the best. It is only when you have assimilated a subject, and projected it again through the medium of your own temperament, that it is of any practical use to you, or indeed has any actual existence for you personally." His opinion ought to have been of some value, for the study of an exact science was by no means the work for which his mind was best fitted; and it is not those whom Nature has endowed with a "royal road" to the attainment of any subject who are best able to direct their fellows. The clock was striking two when he closed his books and extinguished the lamp. It was not his custom to work so late; he was oddly rational in such ways; but he had learned by experience that to act on the principle that "_Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika_" was the only cure--sometimes, alas! not a very effectual one--for moods of depression and bitter self-reproach. The hurricane had raged for several days, but next morning the sun shone down on a smiling innocent world, with a pleasant suggestion of eternal renewal. "I am going for a long drive past Kilwinnie," said Mrs Hamilton at lunch. "I am perishing for lack of fresh air; and I want you to go with me, Ralph." "I am sorry I can't," he said shortly. It must be confessed that Dr Dudley was a man of moods.