mean ?"

"A symptom," said Ernestine, gently, "which has only quite newly been understood to be in connection with a glaucomatous state of the eye; when, as with you, both eyes are affected, but in different degrees, there can be no doubt that the seat of the disorder is in the eye; and in this case the examination with the ophthalmoscope is conclusive; and you will find," she added to Dr. Doldy, "that the globe is perceptibly hard on palpa tion. You have not touched the globe, have you?"

"No," answered Dr. Doldy, "but I am satisfied without that."

Mr. Richy glared at her.

"Just what I feared, just what I feared; a local disorder of the eye! Good heavens, it will be my ruin!"

"But," said Ernestine, "if ridectomy is performed without delay, your sight will almost certainly be saved."

Iridectomy," cried Mr. Richy, "cutting out of the iris! Why, what on earth am I to see with if I have my iris cut out? I thought it was necessary to sight."

"Nature meant it to be," interposed Dr. Doldy, drily; " but disease and surgery have ordered it otherwise. Mr. Richy, allow me to suggest that you go at once to an eminent surgeon. Your sight must be too valuable for you to hesitate about an operation.

"Of course, if it is really necessary," said Mr. Richy.

"It is certainly necessary," re

But when she had finished her task, she turned to him and said, smilingly, "I fancy Mr. Richy thinks that I have given him disease of the eye."

Dr. Doldy made no reply for a moment; and then he said, in a voice which startled her by its unusual vibration, "It is more than even your powers can compass, Ernestine, to carry off such a matter as this lightly."

"I don't understand," she answered, doubtfully.

"I suppose," he went on in a bitter voice, "I am being justly punished for marrying a

woman

who is determined to be something else besides a woman. I did not object to your being something else, so long as you preserved the appearance of being only a woman in my presence; but when you enter my consulting room as a doctor, and a doctor who is not invited, it appears to me that you change our relations; that we are no longer husband and wife, but simply professional rivals."

"It is a pity," said Ernestine, her face flushing with the sudden emotion of realising for the first

time that he was in earnest, "if you think that our double relations cannot exist, for I do not know how we can destroy either."

She walked away into her own consulting room with a rather less dignified air than usual, for, in spite of her superficial coldness, she was too emotional to be capable of quarrelling with her husband.

Dr. Doldy almost immediately followed her. "It is of no use,' he said, "attempting to put this matter aside in silence. It will be impossible for us to live under the same roof unless you can pay that amount of respect to my position which I have a right to expect from my wife. If such scenes as this are to be repeated, I shall be made ridiculous in the eyes of the profession; but, what will be far worse, my practice will be ruined. And, until your practice is sufficiently successful to take its place, you must see that it is madness to interfere with mine."

"But," said Ernestine, with a little tremble in her voice, "what harm have I done? You yourself allow that I have detected Mr. Richy's real malady."

"That may be," said Dr. Doldy; "and pray what do you think Mr. Richy's club friends will say about the way in which his malady was discovered. It is possible that for about a fortnight we may have an influx of gentlemen with nothing much the matter with them who have heard that in my consulting room there is the probability that a beautiful woman will interfere and take their case in hand. But whether we are likely to build a substantial practice upon such a report my experience would incline me to doubt."

Dr. Doldy had been walking up and down while he spoke, and had avoided looking at Ernestine; indeed, he was too angry to look at

her. If he had looked he would probably have been a little startled by the vivid colour in her cheek and the flash in her eye. She was smarting beneath the sense of accumulated humiliations. As she listened to his words, which seemed to her, and not without reason, to be full of insult, her mind returned to the treatment which she had already experienced at Laura's hands. Money, which Ernestine perhaps despised more than she had any right to, seemed to her to have degraded the nature of both uncle and niece. Her tongue itched to speak of what she knew, and to reproach her husband with what she had taught herself to look upon as the one spot in his character.

But she restrained herself by a violent effort, and only said, with so much emotion that speech brought the tears into her eyes, "It seems to me that your profession is money-making, not medicine. As I have educated myself to follow medicine, I had better take your advice and leave your house before any further difficulties arise."

They had been so absorbed by the intensity of their own feelings that neither of them had been aware that a visitor had arrived, nor had noticed Laura's voice as she spoke to the servants and looked in the other rooms of the house for its inmates.

And so it was that just as Ernestine had uttered these words, which seemed to herself in the intensity of her mode of feeling to have ended for ever the dream of happiness which had existed in her connection with Dr. Doldy, Laura knocked lightly at the door, and without any further announcement entered.

She had heard nothing; but it was not likely that such a quickwitted young woman as Laura could come upon such a scene as that and

not read a good deal of it written upon the faces before her.

'I thought I should find you in this room," she said sweetly; "what a lovely room it is. I die with envy of it whenever I come in." Laura said this, unfortunately losing the pleasure of knowing that she stabbed Ernestine to the heart. For Ernestine, to whom to think a thing right was to do it, had already endured the first pang of saying farewell to this room, which was as it were the physical embodiment of the dreamland she had entered into.

"You don't look well," went on the quick tongue of Laura. "It's the weather, I suppose. It is very unbecoming weather; I have had to put on a spotted veil to-day, which makes my eyes ache and makes me cross.'

Her remarks did not seem likely to elicit any very enthusiastic response, so she plunged into her business.

"Uncle," she said, fluttering her fan and her feathers, as she turned to Dr. Doldy, who was still walking up and down, "I hope you have time to receive a visitor to-day, as a friend of mine wishes to call upon you."

"Indeed!" said Dr. Doldy, not in a very encouraging tone.

"Sir Percy Flaxen," said Laura; "you know him, do you not? He wants to see you at once, and I hope you will have no objection to make, but will instead give me your congratulations."

"Does he want to marry you?" said Dr. Doldy, gloomily.

"He says so," said Laura, in her archest manner.

"And so," said Dr. Doldy, drily, "you have found an eligible partner at last?"

"I think," returned Laura, with great demureness, no objection can be made to him or his family."

Silence followed, in the midst of

which Ernestine rose, and, without a word or a look towards uncle or niece, left the room.

She could not at the moment pause to speculate what Dr. Doldy would think of her conduct.

Laura laughed to herself. She had wished to get rid of Ernestine before she went on with another part of her business; and she thought she had succeeded very well, although she was a little disturbed as to what Dr. Doldy might think. It was her principal dread with regard to Ernestine, lest that lady's inability to conceal her feelings should rouse Dr. Doldy's suspicions. But she might have been easy in her mind to-day had she known all. Dr. Doldy would scarcely have been astonished at anything which Ernestine might have done. And indeed he himself felt in anything but a favourable frame of mind to offer congratulations even upon a marriage which so much concerned him as Laura's.

"I want to tell you to ask your advice," said Laura, as soon as the door had closed upon Ernestine, "about another matter which is as distressing as it well can be. In what I have to say you will see one whom you always disliked in a less favourable light than ever."

Dr. Doldy stopped in his promenade and stared at her. He could not conjecture what was coming.

Laura found it much more difficult to tell her uncle than to tell Lewis Lingen; and before she had said many more words she took refuge in handing him Yriarte's letters, trusting to them to tell their own tale discreetly.

Dr. Doldy read them with a rising fury written on his face. Having finished them he flung them down on the table, and turned to walk the room again.

"This comes of connecting

"Then why have you already given him money?"

"What woman," she replied, with a quick droop of those clever eyelids, "would not pay money rather than run the risk of her love letters being made public?"

This seemed true enough to Dr. Doldy, on whose high ideal of her sex Laura was partly calculating in making her impression on him. She went on to tell him that she had been to Mr. Lingen for advice, and that he recommended her to prosecute Yriarte for obtaining money from her on false pretences. "What do you think, uncle?" she asked pathetically, "It will be very, very painful.”

"Punish him, Laura," exclaimed Dr. Doldy angrily; "punish him even at the expense of your own feelings. It will not really be painful, because you are so plainly in the right; you will have the sympathies of all who know you. And he must be punished. I should like to horsewhip him myself!"

Laura had no idea her uncle could be so angry-could so depart from his usual manner, and lose himself in passion. Two great veins had swollen out upon his forehead; she had never seen them before. She did not know that she had but added the match to a welllaid fire. His mind was already

inflamed when she began to irritate it, and it was a vast relief to him to have a subject upon which it might safely explode."

"Let us go down to Lingen at once," went on Dr. Doldy, with suppressed excitement; "will you come, Laura?-we will punish nim ; the little cur! he shall learn what it is to insult a lady."

But

He hurried out of the room to fetch his hat. Laura, preparing in a more leisurely manner to follow him, saw that Ernestine had returned, and stood near. She was startled, although certainly it was natural enough that Ernestine should be in her own room. something in the look that came upon her from out those deep-set eyes affected her strangely, almost as if an uncanny presence were beside her. Ernestine made her feel, by her intensity, that she came from another world of thought.

"Who is to be punished ?" asked Ernestine.

"Do you wish to know ?--I did not think you cared for gossip. I don't mind telling you, as you must soon know unless you shut your eyes and ears. Don Jose Yriarte is the cur my uncle is so anxious to correct."