it. Sometimes he wished his wife were musical; more often he
congratulated himself that she was not. He was sincerely attached to
her, owing--and, what was more significant, realizing that he
owed--her much besides the promising twins; most of all, perhaps, that
she consented to be his wife on his own terms. But she was distinctly
not musical.

The Doctor laid down his paper and took up his mail, and a
disagreeable expression came into his face. It was one of the pleasant
features of his professional career that his brother physicians
occasionally vented their jealousy of him upon one of their joint
patients--stabbing him, so to speak, through _their_ lungs or
heart, wherein he was most vulnerable. Just as he expected! They had
deliberately neglected his prescriptions, after calling him a
winter-journey north to deliver them, and as deliberately allowed the
victim to die according to their treatment rather than permit him to
live according to the Doctor's.

The look upon his face was ugly to behold; he flung open the door with
unnecessary violence before the carriage had stopped, and his foot was
on the pavement before the footman could descend. Then he braced his
rheumatic shoulders for the four steep flights of stairs; he could not
justly complain of the number, since he himself had sent the patient
there to be high and dry and quiet. On the way up he had one of his
nameless seizures of intuition, and in the dark upper hall his hand
fell sharply away from the knocker and his face set whitely. There had
been just one chance in a hundred that his presence was necessary;
before the door opened he knew this had been the hundredth chance.

The ghastly woman's face which met him added nothing to that