“If that was all I wanted I would have stayed in London,” she retorted. She was extraordinarily and almost contemptuously straightforward with Peter Kennedy. She knew that with a man of his limited experience it was unnecessary to be subtle. She may have sometimes encouraged his approaches, but the greater part of the time snubbed him unmercifully. “You don’t put yourself on the same level as Gabriel Stanton, do you?” she asked him scornfully one day when he was gloomily complaining that “a fellow never had a chance.” “If I were not more of a man than that I’d kick myself!” “More of a man!” “You wouldn’t get _me_ to stay at the hotel.” She flushed and said: “Well, you can go now. I’ve had enough of you, you tire me.” “You’ll send for me to come back directly you are ill?” “Very likely. That only means I like your drugs better than you.” He seized her hand, her waist, not for the first time, swore that he would kill himself if she despised and flouted him. Probably she liked the scenes he made her, for she often provoked them. They were mere rough animal scenes, acutely different from those she was able to bring about with Gabriel. But she did not do the only obvious and correct thing, which was to dismiss him and find another doctor. In these strange days, waiting for her freedom, seeing Gabriel Stanton from Saturday to Monday and only Peter Kennedy all the long intervening week, she may have liked the excitement of being attended by a doctor who was madly in love with her. She excused herself to me on the ground that she was a novelist and he a strange and primitive creature of whom she was making a study. Also, curiously enough, he was genuinely musical. Something of an executant and an enthralled listener. He himself suggested more than once that she should have other advice about her heart and he brought his partner to see her. But never repeated the experiment. Dr. Lansdowne purred and prodded her, talking all the time he used his stethoscope, smiling between whiles in a superior way as if he knew everything. Particularly when she tried to tell him her symptoms, or what other doctors had diagnosed. “You have a nurse?” he asked her. “I had better see her nurse, Kennedy.” “A nurse,—why should I have a nurse? I have a maid.” “You ought never to be without a nurse. You ought never to be alone,” he told her solemnly. “Now do, my dear child, be guided by me.” He smiled and patted her. “I will tell Dr. Kennedy all about it, give him full instructions. I will see you again in a few days. Come, Kennedy, I can give you a lift; we will decide what is to be done.” He smiled his farewell. “See me again in a day or two! Not if I know it. Not in a day or two, or a week or two, or a month or two.”