In a crescent of decaying houses he soon perceived like rubies on the murky air the lamps of two doctors adjacent. Had his need been less urgent, such a juxtaposition would have presented an insoluble problem to Edward whose attitude to life was one long hesitation between his right and his left. As it was, he hurried up the first pair of steps and was on the point of pulling the bell, when through a broken slat of the Venetian blinds he saw the occupant of the room thus revealed pour himself out a very generous allowance of whisky or brandy from a dusty decanter unsteadily held in a dirty hand. He paused with his fingers on the knob of the bell while the occupant of the gas-lit room held the decanter in mid-air, listening. The face with its expression of interrupted desire and expectant cunning was so repulsive that Edward was horrified at the idea of such a creature's attending upon his beloved Elizabeth, and in a moment he had put his leg over the low stone parapet that divided the steps of one doctor from the steps of the other. "Yes," the maid told him, "Dr. Harrison is in." Edward explained the case to the doctor, while the latter packed his bag with various instruments, and so much excited was he that he could hardly refrain from plucking at the doctor's sleeve when they were hurrying back through the fog to the lodgings in Pomona Terrace. Dr. Harrison was a young man, scarcely more than thirty, whose manner carried such assurance that Edward was able to feel that his choice had been the right one. When they reached the house the doctor was at once taken upstairs, while Edward, on the suggestion of Mrs. Gallagher, accommodated himself in the kitchen. Here he found old James Taylor on one side of the range talking of agriculture to Mr. Gallagher, a workman in the employ of one of the great railway companies, who was displaying his agreement or disagreement with, his interest in or boredom at the farmer's observations only by the way he sucked at his clay pipe. For an Irishman he was strangely taciturn. From time to time slatternly young women passed through; but whether they were the daughters or servants of the Gallaghers or lodgers in the house, there was no telling. Though Edward took a chair next old Taylor, his thoughts were upstairs, and the old man's lecture on clovers meant as little to him as the chirping of the crickets in the walls of the house. His anxiety over Elizabeth was so sharp that the incongruity of his surroundings never struck him. His whole being was too much involved with his wife's for what is called reality to affect him more nearly than might the incidents of a dream. That he should share a bedroom with old Taylor, that he should find himself deferring to a Gallagher, that he should be expected to take his place at an ill-laid table and eat the malodorous mess there set down by a slut with grimy hands made no impression upon Edward. Had his mother floated into