would never consent to his marriage with Madeleine. He must at once free himself from the chance of any story of this kind being promulgated. The more he thought the matter over, the more he saw the impossibility of again going to Brook-street, after what had occurred; the impossibility of his absence passing without remark and inquiry by Kilsyth; the impossibility of Ronald's withholding his statement of his own conduct in the matter, and his reasons for that conduct. For an instant a ray of hope shot through Chudleigh Wilmot's soul, as he thought that perhaps the reasons might be infinitely less serious and less damaging than he had depicted them to himself; but it died out again at once, and he acknowledged to himself the hopelessness of his situation. He had been indulging in a day-dream from which he had been rudely and ruthlessly waked, and his action must now be prompt and decisive. There was an end to it all; it was Kismet, and he must accept his fate. No combined future for Madeleine and him; their paths lay separate, and must be trodden separately at once; her brother was right, his own dead wife was right--it is not to be! There must be no blinking or shuffling with the question now, he thought. To remain in London without visiting in Brook-street would evoke immediate and peculiar attention; and it was plain that Ronald Kilsyth had determined that Dr. Wilmot's visits to Brook-street were not to be renewed. He must leave London, must leave England at once. He must go abroad for six months, for a year; must give up his practice, and seek change and repose in fresh scenes. He would spoil his future by so doing, blow up and shatter the fabric which he had reared with such industry and patience and self-denial; but what of that? He should ascribe his forced expatriation and retreat to loss of health, and he should at least reap pity and condolence; whereas now every moment that he remained upon the scene he ran the chance of being overwhelmed with obloquy and scorn. He could imagine, vividly enough, how the patients whom he had refused to flatter, whose self-imagined maladies he had laughed at and ridiculed, would turn upon him; how his brother practitioners, who had always hated him for his success, would point to the fulfilment of their never-delivered prophecies, and make much of their own idleness and incompetency; how the medical journals which he had riddled and scathed would issue fierce diatribes over his fall, or, worse than all, sympathise with the profession on--he could almost see the words in print before him--"the breach of that confidence which is the necessary and sacred bond between the physician and the patient."