in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but--"

"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man
called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged."
And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes
under them were bright with something that might be anger or
might be amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."

"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the
clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married.
Now, what can be more important than that?"

The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him
of many things--some said of his health, others of his God;
but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd.
At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him
from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude
of the consulting physician.

"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at
a Lord Mayor's Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether
some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend
of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman.
I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice,
as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England--no, better:
fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon.