‘Do you know that is the first thing I have heard you say in your old manner for months. You are not well. I see it plainly. You are very far from well.’ ‘Which is a polite way of saying that I am lazy, moody, and so on, and that I should shake off my melancholy, and set to work at something. I feel I ought to do that; but, to tell the truth, I feel as if I hadn’t the spirit to attempt it.’ ‘It seems to me that you are slipping the medicine into the spoon yourself; and besides, the close you have chosen is one that doesn’t suit your complaint. It is the weak state of health you are in which is to blame. Now, I want you to go and see a doctor.’ ‘I assure you, Miss Meredith, it is quite unnecessary. There is very little, if anything, the matter with me.’ ‘Let us say it is unnecessary. Won’t you take the trouble of going, if I ask you?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘Then I do ask you.’ That, of course, settled the matter; and before Alec left the house Miss Meredith gave him the name and address of the doctor she wished him to consult. The following morning, accordingly, Alec spent in the physician’s waiting-room. The room was nearly full when he entered it; and as most of those present had made appointments beforehand with the doctor, and were consequently preferred, he had more than an hour to wait. There was plenty of time for him to observe his fellow-patients. One little group, in particular, arrested his attention. It consisted of a young man, a few years older than himself, a girl who was evidently his wife, and a child, a merry little fellow about three years old. The young mother was evidently the patient. She was thin and hollow-eyed; the colour came and went in her pallid cheeks, and her cough was sometimes painful to listen to. The husband sat moodily staring before him. The mother busied herself with the child. As it happened, the boy took a strong fancy for Alec’s stick; and after a shy smile and a faint excuse from his mother, the child succeeded in attaining his object. This led to the interchange of a few remarks between Alec and the child’s parents, from which it appeared that the young man was a clerk in some mercantile house in the City, and was spending an unexpected holiday in the effort to ascertain exactly what ailed his wife. To Alec it seemed plain that the girl (for she seemed hardly beyond girlhood) was in consumption. The only question was what progress the disease had made. When it was Alec’s turn to enter the consulting-room, he thought that the doctor made a ridiculously minute examination, and asked him a number of very unnecessary questions. But he changed his mind when the physician pronounced his verdict. The substance of it was that Alec was in a very precarious state of health; that his lungs were exceedingly delicate, and that he was predisposed to consumption. The prescription was change of scene and cheerful society in the meantime, and a voyage to Australia or a winter spent in Egypt.