"Well, then, Mr. Broadbent mentioned quite by accident this morning that a celebrated London physician, a Doctor Haughton I think he called him, was in the habit of coming up here every day just now to visit Mr. Piggott it the Rookery; and it struck me at the time that it would be a very good plan if we could send round to the Rookery and ask this Doctor Haughton to call in as he was passing and see you." "No!" cried John Claxton in a loud voice, as he started up in his chair; "no, I forbid you distinctly to do anything of the kind. I will have no strange doctor admitted into this house. Understand, Alice, these are my orders, and I insist on their being obeyed." "That is quite enough, John," said Alice; "you know that your will is my law; still I hope to make you think better of it for your own sake and for mine." They said no more about it just then. Alice remained kneeling by her husband, holding his hand in hers, and softly smoothing his hair, and bathing his forehead, until the dinner was announced. The threat of calling in Doctor Haughton seemed to have had an inspiriting effect on the invalid. He ate and drank more than he had done on the three previous days, and talked more freely and with greater gaiety. So comparatively lively was he, that Alice began to hope that he had been merely suffering, as he had said, under an accumulation of business worries, and that with a little rest and quiet he would recover his ordinary health and spirits. Quite late in the evening, as they were sitting together in the library, John began talking to his wife about Tom Durham. He had scarcely touched upon the subject since the news of the unfortunate man's death had arrived in England, and even now he introduced it cautiously and with becoming reverence. "Of course it was a sad blow," he said, "and just now it seems very hard for you to bear; but don't think I have failed to notice, Alice, how, in your love and care for me, you have set aside your own grief lest the sight of your sorrow should distress me." "I don't know that I deserve any gratitude for that, John; my care for you is so very much greater than any other feeling which can possibly enter into my mind, that it stands apart and alone, and I cannot measure others by it. And yet I was very fond of poor Tom," she said, pensively. "It will be a comfort for us to think, not now so much as hereafter, that we did our best to start him in an honest career, and to give him the chance of achieving a good position," said John Claxton. "He had seen a great many of the ups and downs of life, had poor Tom Durham." "He was a strange mixture of good and evil," said Alice; "but to me he was always uniformly kind and affectionate. He had a strange regard for me, as being, I suppose, something totally different from what he was usually brought in contact with; he took care that I should see nothing but the best and brightest side of him, though of course I knew from others that he was full of faults."