The man in the astrakhan coat slowly descended towards the recumbent figure. His eyes were ironical, his expression almost grim. For a moment he stood looking down upon the unconscious dreamer whose pale brown hair peeped from beneath a hat of a shape more familiar in the Quartier Latin than on English shores. Then he prodded the other in the side with his toe. The young fellow roused with a start and blinked up into the big man's face. "Hullo, f--father," he cried with a slight stutter, and rose in perturbation: a ramshackle young fellow, taller even than his father, but entirely lacking the other's girth and authoritative presence. A soft beard framed his long face, and he was wearing the low flannel collar that in the seventies was the height of bad form. "Just like you, Ned," said the elder with a grimness that was not entirely unkind. The son bent and brushed his knees unnecessarily. His face twitched, but he did not attempt to answer. "Your mother's very ill," said the big man casually. He took a letter from his pocket and thrust it towards his son. The young man read it and handed it back. "Is she h--happy?" he asked, his face moved and moving. "She's away all the time--like her son," the other answered; and added more mildly--"She doesn't know any one now--not even the latest parson." He turned and climbed the hill again. On the summit by the flagstaff he paused and looked round deliberately. "Might build an hotel here," he said thoughtfully. "Should pay." BOOK I FATHER AND SON CHAPTER I MR. TRUPP When in the late seventies young Mr. Trupp, abandoning the use of Lister's spray, but with meticulous antiseptic precautions derived from the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of variotomy on the daughter of Sir Hector Moray, and she lived, his friends called it a miracle, his enemies a lucky fluke. All were agreed that it had never been done before, and the more foolish added that it would never be done again. Sir Hector was a well-known soldier; and the operation made the growing reputation of the man who performed it. William Trupp was registrar at the Whitechapel at the time, and a certainty for the next staff appointment. When, therefore, while the columns of the Lancet were still hot with the controversy that raged round the famous case, the young man told Sir Audrey Rivers, whose house-surgeon he had been, that he meant to leave London and migrate to the country, the great orthopædist had said in his grim way to this his favourite pupil: "If you do, I'll never send you a patient." Even in his young days Mr. Trupp was remarkable for the gruff geniality which characterized him to the end. "Very well, sir," he said with that shrewd smile of his. "I must go all the same." Next day Sir Audrey read that his understudy was engaged to Evelyn, only daughter of Sir Hector Moray of Pole.