This was seven years ago, and it now sometimes seemed to Dr. Brand as if his tall Wimpole Street house represented in its stories the various portions of the human anatomy; absolutely distinct in themselves, but held together and kept going by the brain; the ever-busy brain controlling all. His wife's apartments on the first floor; his life with her there, into which his professional interests were so rarely allowed to intrude; certainly they represented the _heart_ of things; the man's whole heart rested and centred there. The floor above was given up to the nurseries, and there, already, two pairs of little feet pattered ceaselessly, and merry voices shouted clear and gleeful, and a little flower-faced girl peeped down at him through the balustrade, and a small boy, gazing earnestly with dark, steadfast eyes into the interior of a jumping rabbit which refused to jump, reproduced absurdly his own intent professional manner. In the basement were the kitchens, and he was as ignorant of them as, he reflected with a smile, every perfectly healthy man should be of the digestive organs of his own anatomy. Then on the ground floor, between the life below-stairs and the life above, but generating the needful supplies to keep the whole establishment going, dwelt the Brain--_his_ brain, his untiring, ever-growing capacity for hard work, represented by his consulting-room, where so many strenuous hours were spent, and the old dining-room, now called the library, where an ever-increasing number of patients waited daily. This floor of his life was practically unshared by any, excepting the faithful and punctilious old butler, whose monotonous "Step this way, sir," "Please to step this way, ma'am," served to punctuate the departure of one case and the arrival of the next. Sometimes the desire to share the interest of this ever-varying daily work with another, gripped him in the throes of its human necessity. When his deep, penetrating eyes had been long bent upon the shifting, shuffling mind of a patient, at last piercing with tender mercilessness to the very core of that mind's malady; when his quick brain had grasped the case in all its bearings, and his magnificent will-power had compelled the shaken soul to see things as he saw them, to believe things as he believed them, to face the future as the future alone could rightly be faced; when his inspiring enthusiasm and belief in God and life and human nature had set that mental cripple on his feet or loosed the bands which had bound some poor "daughter of Abraham,--lo, these eighteen years"; when, conducted by Stoddart's mechanical "Step this way," they passed out from his consulting-room to tread with new hopes the path of a new life, he would stride to his window, squaring his shoulders, and taking in a deep breath of fresh air, he would say: "God, what a victory! I must tell Flower."