Slowly the squire mended. He grew less feeble, and could get about alone again. He seemed like a man recovering from a terrible dream. But the doctors were very careful with him. They had heard a good deal that he had said, and put it down to some terrible story in a book or a newspaper having made a great impression on him when he was in a low, nervous state. So he was forbidden on any account to see a paper yet and none were brought into the house. He was glad of the prohibition. Had he seen a newspaper, the first thing he would have done would have been to search for a paragraph among the old ones in which there was something about the dead body of an old man being found in the Serpentine. CHAPTER LVIII. DR. OLIVER BIRNIE’S NEW PATIENT. Dr. Oliver Birnie’s consulting-room was generally pretty full in the morning, and always with paying patients. He had long since passed the ‘super’ stage of the profession. Lest any intelligent reader should be unacquainted with this phase of medical practice, let me explain that it is the custom when young doctors are anxious to work up a reputation for being fashionable for them to engage a few supers—that is, to give advice gratis to a few selected persons, on condition that they come once or twice a week and help to make a crowd in the waiting-room. A doctor’s house, like a theatre, must be crowded if the proprietor would have a success. An empty waiting-room is like an empty pit; it dispirits the _clientèle_. Let a patient have to wait a couple of hours, and he considers the doctor a great man; let him find himself alone, and be shown in directly, and he imagines that the medical man can’t be clever or he would be busier.