CHAPTER I.

The weary old nineteenth century had advanced into the last twenty
years of its life.

Towards two o'clock in the afternoon, Ovid Vere (of the Royal College
of Surgeons) stood at the window of his consulting-room in London,
looking out at the summer sunshine, and the quiet dusty street.

He had received a warning, familiar to the busy men of our time--the
warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive
work. With a prosperous career before him, he had been compelled (at
only thirty-one years of age) to ask a colleague to take charge of his
practice, and to give the brain which he had cruelly wearied a rest of
some months to come. On the next day he had arranged to embark for the
Mediterranean in a friend's yacht.

An active man, devoted heart and soul to his profession, is not a man
who can learn the happy knack of being idle at a moment's notice. Ovid
found the mere act of looking out of window, and wondering what he
should do next, more than he had patience to endure.

He turned to his study table. If he had possessed a wife to look after
him, he would have been reminded that he and his study table had
nothing in common, under present circumstances. Being deprived of
conjugal superintendence, he broke though his own rules. His restless
hand unlocked a drawer, and took out a manuscript work on medicine of
his own writing. "Surely," he thought, "I may finish a chapter, before
I go to sea to-morrow?"