"I only hope that his anticipations may be realized," I said. "But I fear I'm no more brilliant than a hundred other men in the hospitals. It takes a smart man nowadays to boom himself into notoriety. As in literature and law, so in the medical profession, it isn't the clever man who rises to the top of the tree. More often it is a second-rate man, who has private influence, and has gauged the exact worth of self-advertisement. This is an age of reputations quickly made, and just as rapidly lost. In the professional world a new man rises with every moon." "But that need not be so in your case," she pointed out. "With Sir Bernard as your chief, you are surely in an assured position." Taking her into my confidence, I told her of my ideal of a snug country practice--one of those in which the assistant does the night-work and attends to the club people, while there is a circle of county people as patients. There are hundreds of such practices in England, where a doctor, although scarcely known outside his own district, is in a position which Harley Street, with all its turmoil of fashionable fads and fancies, envies as the elysium of what life should be. The village doctor of Little Perkington may be an ignorant old buffer; but his life, with its three days' hunting a week, its constant invitations to shoot over the best preserves, and its free fishing whenever in the humour, is a thousand times preferable to the silk-hatted, frock-coated existence of the fashionable physician. I had long ago talked it all over with Ethelwynn, and she entirely agreed with me. I had not the slightest desire to have a consulting-room of my own in Harley Street. All I longed for was a life in open air and rural tranquillity; a life far from the tinkle of the cab-bell and the milkman's strident cry; a life of ease and bliss, with my well-beloved ever at my side. The unfortunate man compelled to live in London is deprived of half of God's generous gifts. "Though this unaccountable coldness has fallen between you," Mary said, looking straight at me, "you surely cannot have doubted the strength of her affection?" "But Mrs. Henniker's insinuation puzzles me. Besides, her recent movements have been rather erratic, and almost seem to bear out the suggestion." "That woman is utterly unscrupulous!" she cried angrily. "Depend upon it that she has some deep motive in making that slanderous statement. On one occasion she almost caused a breach between myself and my poor husband. Had he not possessed the most perfect confidence in me, the consequences might have been most serious for both of us. The outcome of a mere word, uttered half in jest, it came near ruining my happiness for ever. I did not know her true character in those days."