At that moment the uncertain step of Wilfrid Somerset was heard on the kitchen stair. “Mrs. Challoner asks me to get the cushions off the armchair,” he said, “and I’m afraid you’ll be wanted,” he added, addressing Tom, “for I’m a poor, useless creature where bodily strength is required.” Without a moment’s hesitation the doctor had diagnosed Mrs. Morison’s “fit.” “She’s been drinking,” he said laconically. “But there is no smell of spirit,” pleaded Lucy, reluctant to lose faith in the unhappy woman. “No,” said the doctor; “but there’s the scent of the little lozenges which gentlemen take to hide the smell of tobacco. That’s the secret, ma’am. This case doesn’t want any treatment save to be put on a safe couch and allowed ‘to sleep it off,’ when I trust she will awake properly ashamed of herself.” It was impossible to carry the heavy inert body to the servant’s bedroom upstairs. But there was a little closet-like room at the back of the hall, empty save for a few ferns and polled plants which Lucy kept there. In that room Mr. Somerset arranged all the cushions he could find in the kitchen, which were not a few, since they included the mattress of a chair-bedstead which stood there in its chair capacity. Then the doctor and Tom Black carried in the unconscious woman, while poor Lucy gathered up the scattered cutlery, which included a broken knife, a toasting-fork, and an oyster opener. “I am so sorry to have called you out on Christmas Day, and for what, after all, was no work of yours,” said Lucy to the doctor as he came back through the hall, drawing down his cuffs and straightening his coat. He gave his head a queer little shake. “It’s hard to know what is a doctor’s work and what isn’t,” he said. “But it’s always a doctor’s work to be useful, if not to the case, why, then, to its caretaker. Get rid of that woman directly she wakes, Mrs. Challoner. Such as she are at the bottom of two-thirds of the awful accidents which happen in the world.” “She might have broken her neck if she had fallen on the stairs,” observed Lucy. “And as she didn’t, she may live to break some other body’s neck,” said the doctor as he went away. Lucy opened the dining-room door and went in, to find poor little Hugh still dutifully watching at the window as Miss Latimer had bidden him. And there was the dining-table, with its gleaming napery and sparkling crystal, standing there as in mockery of the squalid scene which had just been enacted. “And is it to this misery that I have invited my guests?” cried Lucy. Even as she spoke her eye fell on her little desk, with her unfinished letter to Charlie peeping out of the blotting-case. That letter could not be finished now. It could never be sent. Then the memory of all she had believed and hoped rolled back on her. If there is anything calculated to give us the sensation of despair, it is the recollection of thanksgiving offered for what in the end has proved disastrous!