"Why, hallo!" exclaimed the Major, glancing up at the sound of a blind being drawn above, in the Custom House window. "What the deuce is delaying Pennefather?"

While he speculated, Scipio emerged from the house, bearing in one hand a decanter of brown sherry, and in the other a visitor's card.

"Eh--what? M. Cesar Dupin?" The Major, holding the card almost at arm's length, conned it with a puzzled frown.

"From Guernsey, Major."

"Good Lord! And I've just invited Pennefather!" The Major rose half-way from his chair with a face of dismay.

Scipio glanced up at the Custom House window. He, too, had caught the sound of the drawn blind.

"Mas' Pennefather, Major, if you'll excuse me, he see a hole t'ro' a ladder, but not t'ro' a brick wall. Shall I show the genelman in?"

"I fear," began Miss Marty, as the Doctor took a seat in the parlour, "I greatly fear that Scipio has carried the brown sherry out to the terrace."

Dr. Hansombody smiled as a lover but sighed as a connoisseur.

"There is the Fra Angelico, however." She stepped to a panelled cupboard on the right of the chimney-piece. "Made from my own recipe," she added archly.

The Doctor lifted a hand in faint protest; but already she had set a gla.s.s before him. He knew the Fra Angelico of old. It was a specific against catarrh, and he had more than once prescribed it for Scipio.

"Wine is wine," continued Miss Marty, reaching down the bottle.

"And, after all, when one knows what it is made of, as in this case-- that seems to me the great point."

"You mustn't think--" began the Doctor.

"I must plead guilty"--Miss Marty poured out a gla.s.sful--"if its name suggests a foreign origin. You men, I know, profess a preference for foreign wines; and so, humorously, I hit on the name of Fra Angelico, from the herb angelica, which is its main ingredient. In reality, as I can attest, it is English to the core."

The Doctor lifted his gla.s.s and set it down again.

"You will join me?" he asked, pointing to the decanter and temporising.

"Pardon me. I indulge but occasionally: when I have a cold."

"And the Major?"

"He pleads habit. He says he is wedded to the vintages of France and Spain. 'What?' I rally him, 'when those two nations are at war with us? And you call yourself a patriot?' He permits these railleries."

"He is a man in a thousand!"

"There is no man like him!"

"If we exclude a certain resemblance--"

"You refer to the Prince Regent? But I was thinking only of _moral_ grandeur."

"True. All else, if one may say so without disloyalty, is but skin-deep."

"Superficial."

"Thank you, the expression is preferable, and I ask your leave to subst.i.tute it."

"Solomon, my kinsman, is the n.o.blest of men."

"And you, Miss Marty, the best of women!" cried the Doctor, taking fire and a sip of the Fra Angelico together, and gulping the latter down heroically. "I drink to you; nay, if I dared, I would go even farther--

"No, no, I beg of you!" Her eyes, downcast before this sudden a.s.sault, let fall two happy tears, but a feeble gesture of the hand besought his mercy. "Let us talk of _him_," she went on breathlessly. "His elevation of character--"

"If he were to marry, now?" the Doctor suggested. "Have you thought of that?"

"Sometimes," she admitted, with a flutter of the breath, which sounded almost like a sigh.

"It would serve to perpetuate--"

"But where to find one worthy of him? She must be capable of rising to his level; rather, of continuing there."

"You are sure that is necessary? Now, in my experience," the Doctor inclined his head to one side and rubbed his chin softly between thumb and forefinger--a favourite trick of his when diagnosing a case--"in my observation, rather, some disparity of temper, taste, character, may almost be postulated of a completely happy alliance; as in chemistry you bring together an acid and an alkali, and, always provided they don't explode--"

"_He_ would never be satisfied with that. Believe me, the woman he condescends upon must, in return for that happy privilege, surrender her whole fate into his hands. Beneath his deference to our s.e.x he carries an imperious will, and would demand no less."

"There _is_ a little bit of that about him, now you mention it,"

a.s.sented the Doctor.

"But let us not cheat--" Miss Marty checked herself suddenly.

"Let us not vex ourselves with any such apprehensions. He will never marry, I am convinced. I cannot imagine him in the light of a parent--with offspring, for instance. Rather, when I see him in his regimentals, or, again, in his mayoral robe and chain--you have noticed how they become him?--"

The Doctor admitted, with a faint sigh, that he had.

"Well, then, he puts me in mind of that--what d'you call it, which the poets tell us is reproduced but once in several hundred years?"

"The blossoming aloe?" suggested the Doctor.

Miss Marty shook her head. "It's not a plant--it's a kind of bird.

It begins with 'P, h,'--and you think of Dublin."

"Let me see--Phelim? No, I have it! Phoenix."

"That's it--Phoenix. And when it's going to die it lights a fire and sits down upon it and another springs up from the ashes."

"But I don't see how that applies to the Major."

"No-o?" queried Miss Marty, dubiously. "Well, not in every particular; but the point is, there's only one at a time."

"The same might be said," urged the Doctor, delicately, "of other individual members of the Town Council; with qualifications, of course."

"And somehow I feel--I can't help a foreboding--that if ever we lose him it will be in some such way."

"Miss Marty!" The Doctor stood up, with horror-stricken face.