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at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control.
Mrs. Moon's gaze had embraced them in a common condemnation, and
the subtle sympathy of their youth linked them closer and made them
one in their intimate appreciation of her.
"Then you must be a very singular young man. I thought you doctors
were never happy until you'd found some mare's nest in people's
constitutions? You'd much better let well alone."
"Miss Quincey is very far from well," said Cautley with recovered

gravity, "and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long."
Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady.
And indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it
sent her poor wits wandering in the past. Her voice sank suddenly from
grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.
"I've no faith in medicine," she quavered, "nor in medical men either.
Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife's
side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana's father and Louisa's.
He was a medical man. He wrote a book, I daresay you've heard of it;
Quincey on Diseases of the Heart it was. But he's dead now, of one of
'em, poor man. We haven't seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years."
"Then isn't it almost time that you should see one now?" said he,
cheerfully taking his leave. "I shall look round again in the morning."
He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss
Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.
He was very nice to look at, this young man. He was so clean-cut and
tall and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was
so firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were
dark and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey.
Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did
see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather
worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very
gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible
to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever
doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so
young but so formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected
him to look like that. All the clever young men she had met had
displayed a noble contempt for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey
knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were
limited to three little eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art
studio. But for the gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery,
for whenever Miss Quincey thought of a man she thought of something
like Louisa's husband, Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong

Scotch accent, and wore flannel shirts with celluloid collars, and coats
that hung about him all anyhow. But Dr. Cautley was not in the least
like Andrew Mackinnon. He had a distinguished voice; his clothes
fitted him to perfection; and his linen, irreproachable itself, reproved
her silently.
Her eyes left him suddenly and wandered about the room. She was full
of little tremors and agitations; she wished that the towels wouldn't
look so much like dish-cloths; she credited him with powers of
microscopic observation, and wondered if he had noticed the stain on
the carpet and the dust on the book-shelves, and if he would be likely to
mistake the quinine tabloids for vulgar liver pills, or her bottle of
hair-wash for hair-dye. Once released from its unnatural labours, her
mind returned instinctively to the trivial as to its home. She glanced at
her hat, perched conspicuously on the knob of the looking-glass, and a
dim sense of its imperfections came over her and vanished as it came.
Then she tried to compose herself for the verdict.
It did not come all at once. First of all he asked her a great many
questions about herself and her family, whereupon she gave him a
complete pathological story of the Moons and Quinceys. And all the
time he looked so hard at her that it was quite embarrassing. His eyes
seemed to be taking her in (no other eyes had ever performed that act of
hospitality for Miss Quincey). He pulled out a little book from his
pocket and made notes of everything she said; Miss Quincey's
biography was written in that little book (you may be sure nobody else
had ever thought of writing it). And when he had finished the
biography he talked to her about her work (nobody