He smiled, waved a friendly hand, and ran down the steps to his car. Baltazar watched him crank-up, slip to the wheel, and depart, without saying a word in self-defence. So far from offending him, the doctor had risen higher in his estimation. A man with brains, and the faculty of using them; a fellow of remarkable penetration; also of courage. He differentiated his outspokenness from Pillivant’s blatancy. The former was one man of intellect speaking frankly to another; the latter. . . . He remembered the lecture, illustrated by quotations from the Chinese classics, which he had read to Quong Ho when his disciple, on his first visit to Water-End, had complained of the lack of manners of the local inhabitants. Why should he worry about Pillivant? As he had said to Quong Ho: “_Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered._” Never mind Pillivant. It was Rewsby, and Rewsby’s quick summing-up of his psychological tendencies that mattered. Not a human being had ever before presented him to himself in any just and intelligible way. Of course he had heard truths, pseudo-truths, dictated by violent prejudice, in his brief and disastrous married life. But they had all been superficial; never gone to bed-rock. Since then he had been free as a god from criticism. And now came this shrewd, sagacious country doctor, who in the lightest, friendliest way in the world, put an unerring finger on the real unsound spot in his character. “. . . A very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.” Behind those commonplace words he knew lay a wise man’s condemnation of his habitual dealing with life. He walked through the tiny town on his way to “The Cedars,” unconscious of the curious interest of the inhabitants, to whom the sight of the mystery-enveloped and now bombed and head-bandaged tenant of Spendale Farm was a matter of eager, instantaneous mental photography, so that the picture could be produced as a subject for many weeks’ future gossip, and he pondered deeply over Dr. Rewsby’s criticism. “Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”