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mistake in this case. There is every symptom of glaucoma."

"Bah!" said Dr. Doldy, almost impatiently; "seeing so many eye operations has turned your head. The man has dined out too frequently, and has not taken enough exercise. That is all."

"Let me see him," said Ernestine.

"Very well; if you will be in the drawing-room in about ten minutes I will bring him there. As he is a lover of beauty by profession I am sure he will be delighted to come. I have yet to meet with the man who would refuse your invitation."

This was said with a smile of mingled meanings, but Ernestine did not respond but by a little sigh of regret.

I

"Well," she said, "I suppose must submit to that if you wish it; but I should like to have used the ophthalmoscope myself to-day."

Dr. Doldy made no reply, but left her, and returned to his patient without even another look in her direction.

The truth was that he scarcely knew what his eyes would express if he did look at her, for his mind was for the moment much confused by a new aspect of their relations to each other. As yet Ernestine had been to him a beautiful woman with a foible. He had no mind to see in her an actual practitioner of a new school.

Ernestine, meanwhile, went up stairs, the straight downward line remaining unmoved upon her brow. She went into the drawing-room without removing her out-door dress. Her mind was profoundly abstracted after the fashion of a new and earnest worker.

Dr. Doldy would probably have laughed at her if she had taken him into her confidence at this moment. He had long passed the stage when a patient's life or death, or a new discovery in medicine or

physics, could cause him to forget small conventions. But Ernestine was yet young enough to be thorough. She sat down and took from her pocket a note-book which had been very recently filled, as might be easily seen by the freshness of its leaves. Dr. Doldy and Mr. Richy found her still absorbed in studying this.

Mr. Richy knew her. He had met her once in society, and had not forgotten her; for, as Dr. Doldy had said, he was a professed admirer of beauty. He saw in her the charming and beautiful wife of an old friend, and he bowed low over her hand with the politeness of the old school to which he belonged, little aware of the meaning of the keen glance which met his eyes.

Mr. Richy had but a brief time to stay, for he had already prolonged his consultation with Dr. Doldy; and, after a few moments of small talk and some polite phrases of congratulation, he departed.

Dr. Doldy, after bowing him out, returned to Ernestine's side to find her face of perplexity resolved into one of smiles and brightness.

His was now the perplexed countenance, for he did not understand the secret of this change.

She looked up at him with a smile of enthusiasm.

"We can save his sight," she said, "but it must be done at once.'

"What are you talking of?" said Dr. Doldy.

"I am talking," said Ernestine, recalling herself to the reality of the position, "of Mr. Richy's eyes. I feel some interest in them, for I like his pictures; and imagine," she added, "the horror to an artist whose sight is infinitely more sensitive than ours, of total blindness."

"But there is no such danger

for Richy," said Dr. Doldy; "you are talking nonsense. There is a haze over his eyes from biliousness; he will be all right in a week or two with careful diet.

"No," said Ernestine; "I saw that the pupil is dilated to a degree that shows only a mere ring of iris; and the iris is discoloured."

Dr. Doldy laughed aloud. "That is all very well," said he;" but the man has constant nausea."

"So I heard him say," said Ernestine composedly. "You forget that I heard him detail his sufferings; and, perhaps, you don't remember either that recurrent vomiting is now ascertained to be one of the symptoms in an acute case of glaucoma."

"You are falling into the snare which besets young doctors who study a specialty," said Dr. Doldy, with a rather ineffectual effort to retain his coolness. "You think every patient is afflicted in the organ which you have studied. Modern discoverers appear to discover what they want to find. Richy would think I was mad if I told him he was made sick by a local disease of the eye. If new doctors avow such theories, I hope it is in the medical journals only, and not to their patients."

Ernestine had shut up her notebook, and was moving towards the door.

"We need not discuss that," said she, without any of the heat in her voice which had begun to be apparent in Dr. Doldy's. She was much too interested in the matter in hand to think of quarrelling about it. "We need not discuss that," she said, "for we need not tell him anything until we are quite certain that iridectomy must be performed at once. And to be certain of that we ought, of course, to use the opthalmoscope in a good light."

"Don't think me pragmatical," she added, pausing at the door, and turning to him with a winning smile. "I am really interested in the case; it is not all the vaingloriousness of a young doctor. I am not craving to perform the operation: I would not dare to attempt it. And I don't at all sympathise with the surgeons who delight in the operation of iridectomy because it is so interesting to give health to an eye by taking out the very part ordinarily considered necessary for health. I am not afflicted with the passion for operations; iridectomy does not fascinate me because it is asserted that the larger the piece of the iris cut out, the more complete the cure; and I am quite aware that, in some cases where it has been performed, the other eye has got well. Indeed, Arthur, I can quite understand your laughing at the absurdities committed by young doctors with specialties; and I am only anxious that Mr. Richy should have the benefit of further examination."

She went away full of her thoughts, leaving Dr. Doldy to his

own.

These did not seem to be very tranquil ones, for he walked the drawing-room in a manner unusual to him.

This was the first sign of interference with his patients-the first breach on the unwritten laws which Ernestine had committed. Dr. Doldy would have been furiously angry with anybody but Ernestine. With her it was different. It was a new sensation even thinking himself justified in being angry with her. But still, he was intensely annoyed.

After some little time, he followed Ernestine, intending to talk the matter over with her, and dissuade her from doing anything to break the harmony of their life. He determined to point out to her that it was simple madness for her to

interfere between himself and a patient such as Mr. Richy.

He could not find her; and, on asking the servants, found that she had gone out.

In the evening, when they met again, the incident had almost been forgotten by both.

CHAPTER XXVII.

LEWIS LINGEN'S OFFICE. LAURA had temporised; she had pawned as many jewels as she dared, to gain a temporary reprieve from Yriarte's claims. She wanted to postpone her revenge on him-to put him out of her thoughts while she carried on the more immediately interesting operation of catching a new lover.

But he had no idea of being satisfied or even temporarily pacified with the small sums she was able to give him. He wrote to her again, telling her that Anton absolutely refused to give up any of the letters unless the whole debt were paid; and that he much feared Anton had read some of the letters and was likely himself to go to her uncle and demand money.

This letter an ill-written, misspelt scrawl-kept Laura in a fever for an hour, shut in her

room.

Sir Percy Flaxen had proposed marriage to her only the night before, under the helpful influence of a good deal of champagne. The announcement of her engagement would be made whenever she gave him permission to go to Dr. Doldy.

And now she dared not give this permission until she had taken some step with regard to Yriarte. If Dr. Doldy were in new possession of her secret, when Sir Percy Flaxen went to him-especially with Ernestine's influence upon him-she knew not what catastrophe might not result. She was unable to grasp her uncle's mind;

she could not calculate on his probable actions. The combination of worldliness with a certain chivalrous purity of character which was visible in him puzzled her entirely. She distrusted him with a different distrust from that which she bestowed on Mrs. Honiton. The lady was wholly absorbed in selfinterest; and Laura knew that beyond a certain point her sympathies were not to be expected. Dr. Doldy she mistrusted simply because she never quite understood when he might turn upon her with horror and denounce her as having gone too far. And, when he did condemn her, she feared him; his judgment descended upon her from a platform nearer her own than Ernestine's; one less ideal and more intelligible to her.

Yriarte's threat could not have come to her at a more alarming moment. She dreaded the destruction of all her hopes. She had determined to marry Sir Percy; he was perfectly eligible himself according to her taste, and his family was one she would wish to enter. But how dare she advance another step in the matter with Yriarte and his creditor in possession of her letters-prepared at any moment

to reveal her secret to her uncleperhaps to Sir Percy himself?

Her spirit rose with the exigency of her position; she determined to take a step which she very much dreaded. She did not know the real legal view of the position; what she might do and what she might not do with safety. She must have good advice. She must go to Mr. Lingen and give him. a half-confidence. And it took all the necessity of her position to drive her to this; for, with a secret to keep, there was nothing she dreaded so much as the blank gaze through Lewis Lingen's eye-glass.

She thought she knew this man well. She believed him heartless,

keen as a knife all through. She supposed him wholly incapable of being affected by such an appeal as she had made to Ernestine, even if genuine. She prepared herself

simply to reserve from him all that he must not know. And this had to be done, not only in her words, but in every expression of her face while in his presence.

She dressed carefully, took Yriarte's letters, and drove alone, in Mrs. Honiton's carriage, to Mr. Lingen's office.

He was disengaged: he could see Miss Doldy at once. Laura left her carriage, and, gathering her dainty skirts together, passed in, much to the gratification of the clerks in the outer office, who looked admiringly after her as she vanished within Mr. Lingen's sanctum.

He sat in the dingy room, as usual, behind the table piled with dusty-looking papers, looking himself as fresh and spotless as the summer morning. He wore an abstracted air, and, holding the guard of his eye-glass in one hand, waved it gently to and fro, as though it were out of service just then, and were having a little play time.

Laura was delighted to see that when the ordinary greetings were over, and she had taken a seat, which brought her face as little under the light as possible, he fell into the same attitude and action again.

Courage rose when she found that he did not even look at her when she began to speak; and she proceeded to give a cleverly incomplete account of the affair upon which she had come.

Lewis Lingen was well accustomed to such confidences. Many a fashionable lady had sat in that chair before Laura, and had endeavoured to tell her wrongs while concealing her wrong-doings. Many a beautiful woman had been com

pelled to sit there and herself reveal the weak places in the armour of her reputation-which, if once made visible to the arch enemy who makes scandal, would have enabled the whole coat of mail to be shattered, and have left the frail and defenceless being underneath to the mercy of all the winds of malice. And if Laura had had experience of her confessor's aspect in such interviews she would have been alarmed. He had never used his keen eyes so little and had never listened to a recital with so marked a lack of interest. He wore the air of a novel reader who, on opening the first volume, is filled with a wearied sense that it is hardly worth while to ask for the third-the plot is so easily understood. Laura's actual words were the first volume of this story. To discover the whole history and amuse oneself with the intricacies of the plot, it would have been necessary to study her face, and there find the real interest of the story. But perhaps her hearer had heard too many similar ones. At all events, he did not seem to care to penetrate beyond the sketch which she vouchsafed to him.

Laura did not know enough of him to be alarmed at this; on the contrary, it relieved her immensely, and she was just pluming herself on having relieved herself of her confidences in a most creditable way, when Lingen roused himself from his abstraction, and turned to her with the languid air of a man who makes a remark which is void of interest.

"Of course the first thing, at all costs, is to regain the letters. We must not run any risk of their being published."

Laura almost gasped for breath. What did he mean? She reviewed her words hastily. She had cer

tainly said nothing about the letters except that they had been written during her engagement. She

looked at him. His face was perfectly expressionless; his eyes had fallen upon a pile of papers in front of him, and he seemed to be reading the uppermost one. She was reassured; he meant nothing. She moved her lips with some difficulty and spoke hesitatingly.

Certainly; any such publication would be very unpleasant."

"Humph!" said Mr. Lingen. He put his hand across the table and took up a little bundle, which Laura had put on it. They were Yriarte's letters asking for money. Mr. Lingen glanced them through, and then put up his eye-glass and turned it upon Laura.

"Mr .Yriarte is a shrewd man," he said, reflectively. "He would scarcely have threatened you with the publication of these letters unless he were fully aware that the weakness of your position lay in your dreading their publication. You must have forgotten what you said in them."

Laura was at a loss for words.

But," she said, at last, "what should I have said in them?"

Mr. Lingen raised his eyebrows, and there was a curious flash in

his eyes; but he was perfectly

grave.

That," he said, "I must leave to you."

Laura was dumb for a moment, paralysed with surprise and anger. She rose with dignity after a little pause; her face was flushing darkly.

"I don't understand your meaning," she said; "I will wish you a good morning."

Mr. Lingen rose languidly.

"Excuse me, Miss Doldy, a moment. When I undertake an affair like this I can only be of any use if I know the whole story. When a client chooses to tell me only a part of the facts, I am obliged to make up the rest from my experience and knowledge." "I don't understand,"

said

Laura, standing doubtfully beside her chair.

"Unless," he went on, "you not only wish to punish Mr. Yriarte for his impertinent conduct, but also to suppress the actual facts of your connection with him, you will gain little by consulting me about it."

Laura sat down again. The flush died out of her face beneath that terrible eye-glass. She trembled beneath it. After a struggle she recalled a little of her customary presence of mind.

"I can understand now," she said, smiling faintly, "why you are so dreaded by witnesses."

"Forgive me, Miss Doldy," he said, courteously; " I am not trying to extract anything from you. I only wish you to see that it is useless to come to me with half confidences. Perhaps, as Mr. Yriarte is no longer your lover, you will allow me to call him a scoundrel. A few months ago he was borrowing money on the assertion that he was engaged to an heiress who dared not risk her reputation by throwing him over. If you choose to allow that you were that heiress I will arrange the matter for you and get him the punishment he so so richly deserves; but, if you are not that heiress, my clerk can easily manage

it for you."

Laura had not heard the last words. She leaned forward in her chair with the flush rising again in her face, and one hand clenched itself fiercely as it lay in her lap.

'Dared not!" she said. "Dared not! But I did! I threw him over when I found he was a mere fortune hunter!-and he thinks to intimidate me now!"

Mr. Lingen's brow cleared-he dropped his eyeglass and smiled.

"Go straight to Dr. Doldy," he said, "and tell him as much as you told me at first. If you tell it to him as cleverly he will not suspect

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