Running his eye over the long rows of marble tablets which served to seal the openings of the cells which held the coffins, he was struck by the fact that two departed wives of doctors of medicine were amongst those deposited in the west wall. Nothing extraordinary in this—nothing to excite the least remark for most observers; but in Mr. Crowe’s present condition it set him wondering how much longer it would be ere he would be relieved of the now almost intolerable burden of a sick wife. Who stood a better chance with Mildred Lee than he, the old friend of the heiress’s father, himself her tutor? Admired by her for his science he knew he was—why not admired for himself, perhaps, if only free? He had never really loved his wife; he had married her for her fortune, and had been disappointed in its amount. He was not capable of loving anything but wealth and fame. He ardently longed to make some discovery which should bring him prominently before the medical world. To upset the theory of the last German or Frenchman whose work made any noise in the literature of the day, and to establish on the ruins of his reputation a better and more consistent one of his own: this was worth his days and nights of anxious thought, and his toilsome and patient investigation. So morbid had he become that he looked upon all mankind from a pathological point of view, and it was seldom that he could not detect abnormal processes at work in those with whom he came in contact. His work absorbed him; and when he desired to hold converse with any one, it was on those topics connected with it alone. Possessed of a small patrimony, worth to him some £250 a year, he was compelled to add to his income by taking pupils to “coach” for the higher professional examinations. In this work he was very successful, for he was a painstaking and impressive teacher. He was withal a skilful surgeon, and had made many wonderful cures. He had rooms in a well-known street of doctors, but was consulted with extreme infrequency. His appointment as surgeon to St. Bernard’s did him little good in a pecuniary sense, for no patient liked him; and no man or maid-servant whose health had been restored under his care ever took the least pains to get master or mistress to call him to any case of sickness. Nobody ever thanked him for a cure; nobody ever gave him credit for curing him. A great many poor hospital patients gave him the credit for anything that went wrong with them while under his treatment; but their blame or their praise was equally a matter of indifference to him, who occupied himself only, as he said, with Man in general, especially man in the future, to the utter disregard of the man particular and the man present.