“Stop!” Sir Philip called out, imperiously, as Dr. Netherbridge reached the door. “You will please send Lady Cranstoun’s medicine, and call to see her to-morrow. I will send the carriage for you at noon. If she has taken the whim in her head to be cured by you, she must have her way. Oh, by the bye, I may mention to you what you have no doubt found out for yourself. Lady Cranstoun’s father, Mr. Carewe, of Yorkshire, died in a madhouse, and I have often reason to fear my wife has inherited a touch of the complaint. Her statements since her illness began are incoherent in the extreme, and totally unreliable. But you will, of course, make allowance for that. Good-evening.” “Good-evening, Sir Philip.” Dr. Netherbridge seemed to breathe more freely when he found himself outside the gray fortress-like walls of the Chase. No patient he had ever yet had could approach in interest that fragile creature with the deathly white face and great dark eyes, whose husband was her worst enemy, and whose servants were her spies. “You will be my friend, will you not?” The words and the pathetic look which accompanied them haunted the young man. Especially since he had seen her husband a deep pity for her had taken possession of his mind. In speaking of his wife, Sir Philip’s voice, naturally hard, grew harder still, and the cold gleam of his eyes appeared absolutely diabolical. The whole of the Cranstouns’ miserable married life seemed to be laid bare before the doctor as he made his way thoughtfully toward his bachelor home, borne along the dark roads in the comfortable carriage in which he had come. He pictured to himself the spoiled, impulsive girl, little more than a child, whose strange beauty and proud maidenliness had won Sir Philip Cranstoun’s short-lived but passionate love. Such a union could only end in one way between so ill-matched a pair, and the woman who, with kind and tender but firm treatment, might have proved herself a loving and devoted wife and mother, had been cowed, terrified, sneered at, and repressed, until she had become the miserable nerve-wracked creature whom he had just seen. It was with some approach to excitement that the little doctor prepared to inquire of his housekeeper--a garrulous, gossiping, stout woman--concerning what had taken place before the Recorder that day. But the initiative was taken by Mrs. Brooks herself, who, as she laid his frugal supper on the table, plunged at once into the subject on her mind: