necessary to 'ask,' and 'asking' was the torture of tortures. So he had
wandered, solicitous and helpless, up and down the stairs, until at
length Leek, ceasing to be a valet and deteriorating into a mere human
organism, had feebly yet curtly requested to be just let alone,
asserting that he was right enough. Whereupon the envied of all
painters, the symbol of artistic glory and triumph, had assumed the
valet's notorious puce dressing-gown and established himself in a hard
chair for a night of discomfort.

The bell rang once more, and there was a sharp impressive knock that
reverberated through the forlorn house in a most portentous and
terrifying manner. It might have been death knocking. It engendered the
horrible suspicion, "Suppose he's _seriously_ ill?" Priam Farll sprang
up nervously, braced to meet ringers and knockers.


_Cure for Shyness_


On the other side of the door, dressed in frock coat and silk hat, there
stood hesitating a tall, thin, weary man who had been afoot for exactly
twenty hours, in pursuit of his usual business of curing imaginary
ailments by means of medicine and suggestion, and leaving real ailments
to nature aided by coloured water. His attitude towards the medical
profession was somewhat sardonic, partly because he was convinced that
only the gluttony of South Kensington provided him with a livelihood,
but more because his wife and two fully-developed daughters spent too
much on their frocks. For years, losing sight of the fact that he was an
immortal soul, they had been treating him as a breakfast-in-the-slot
machine: they put a breakfast in the slot, pushed a button of his