Her face was transfigured with a sudden radiance. Amazement, rapture, youth--the pulsating wonder of her twenty years danced in her eyes. In her excitement she pulled me by the lapels of my coat---- "_Doctor_! DOCTOR! Three thousand pounds a year! England! London! Men and women! Everything I've longed for! All the glad and beautiful things of life!" "Yes, my dear." She took my hands and swung them backwards and forwards. "It's Heaven! Delicious Heaven!" she cried. "But what about the broken heart?" I said maliciously. She dropped my hands, sighed, and her face suddenly assumed an expression of portentous misery. "I was forgetting. What does anything matter now? I shall never get over it. My heart _is_ broken." "Devil a bit, my dear," said I. THE SCOURGE I Up to the death of his wife, that is to say for fifty-six years, Sir Hildebrand Oates held himself to be a very important and upright man, whose life not only was unassailable by slander, but even through the divine ordering of his being exempt from criticism. To the world and to himself he represented the incarnation of British impeccability, faultless from the little pink crown of his head to the tips of his toes correctly pedicured and unstained by purples of retributive gout. Except in church, where a conventional humility of attitude is imposed, his mind was blandly _conscia recti_. No ghost of sins committed disturbed his slumbers. He had committed no sin. He could tick off the Ten Commandments one by one with a serene conscience. He objected to profane swearing; he was a strict Sabbatarian; he had honoured his father and his mother and had erected a monument over their grave which added another fear of death to the beholder; he neither thieved nor murdered, nor followed in the footsteps of Don Juan, nor in those of his own infamous namesake; and being blessed in the world's goods, coveted nothing possessed by his neighbour--not even his wife, for his neighbours' wives could not compare in wifely meekness with his own. In thought, too, he had not sinned. Never, so far as he remembered, had he spoken a ribald word, never, indeed had he laughed at an unsavoury jest. It may be questioned whether he had laughed at any kind of joke whatsoever.