"Need you ask?"

"Prescribed iron and strychnine, I suppose. Or did he suggest cold baths?"

"No, as you say, he prescribed iron, quinine, and strychnine."

Lord Henry glanced at his note-book.

"Of course, I am absolutely full up. But--but----"

Mrs. Delarayne fidgeted.

"I'm afraid I shall have to come if I'm to do any good. My senior assistant here will have to do the best he can, that's all."

Although Mrs. Delarayne was quite prepared for this, she had hoped even until the last that Lord Henry might be able to treat Cleopatra from a distance, and that she would therefore be spared the duty of having him at Brineweald. It was a hard pill to swallow, but she took it gracefully.

"When can you come?" she asked with forced cheerfulness.

"Can you send the car for me at about quarter to eight this evening?"

Mrs. Delarayne promised to do this, and the young man rose.

She held his hand for some time as they said good-bye, and gazed longingly into his face. It seemed to her that after this last meeting, alone, on their old terms, nothing could any longer be quite the same.

He would become the friend of other members of her family. He would no longer be her private refuge, her nook-and-corner intimate, her own friend, her secret.

"Lord Henry," she pleaded on their way downstairs, "would you advise me to say anything to Leonetta?"

"What can you say?" he protested.

"My sister says I ought to scold the child for what she calls her 'fast'

way with young men."

"Oh, nonsense!" Lord Henry exclaimed. "What can you tell the girl?--to be less fascinating, to be less beautiful, to be less full of life? That would be as futile as it would be deforming. You can only watch her so that she does not come to harm, or fall into the hands of a villain. You cannot moralise. I think you have been wonderful to restrain yourself so far. But continue doing so."

"You see, I remember what I was at her age!" the widow admitted bashfully.

Lord Henry laughed, and in a moment she laughed with him.

He accompanied her to the door, and feeling very much relieved she rejoined her daughter.

At half-past four that afternoon, just as the car bearing away Lord Henry's last out-patient, had glided out of the drive, he sent for St.

Maur.

The day had been a particularly heavy one. Unfortunate, miserable, and beautiful girls, with everything they could wish for, had come in their dozens for the last month, with nervous tics that utterly marred their beauty and blighted their lives. He had seen no less than three that day. Business men, Army men, clergymen, married women, mothers, each with some kind of nervous catch in their voices, uncontrollable spasms in their limbs, stammers, or obsessions,--everyone was now beginning to hear of Lord Henry's wonderful success in dealing with such cases, and he was getting inconveniently busy.

Only a few were perhaps aware that he derived most of his skill in the handling of these nervous disorders from the teaching of a certain Austrian Jew of brilliant genius; but even those who knew this fact also recognised that he had shown such enormous ability in adapting the principles of his Semitic master to modern English conditions that he was entitled to be regarded quite as much as an innovator as a disciple.

What Lord Henry had done could have been accomplished only by an Englishman of exceptional intelligence. He had discovered that the almost universal feature of nervous abnormalities in England, which were not the outcome of trauma or congenital disease, arose out of the national characteristic of "consuming one's own smoke." He had been the first to demonstrate with scientific precision that the suppression of Catholicism in England, with its concomitant proscription of the confessional box from the churches, had laid the foundation of three quarters of the nation's nervous disabilities. He had thus called attention to yet one more objectionable and stupid feature of the Protestant Church, and one which was perhaps more nauseating, more sordid, than any to which his friend Dr. Melhado was so fond of pointing. Thus he called his sanatorium in Kent "The Confessional," and his methods, there, followed pretty closely the methods of the mediaeval Church.

He would point out that it was this absence of the rite of confession that made people in Protestant countries so conspicuously more self-conscious than the inhabitants of Catholic countries. For nothing leads to self-consciousness more certainly than the attempt constantly to consume one's own smoke.

"The independence, individualism, and natural secrecy of the English character, together with the enormous amount of sex suppression that English Puritanism involves," he used frequently to say, "leads to an incredible amount of consumption of their own smoke by millions of the English people. Large numbers of these people are able to digest the fumes, others fall ill with nervous trouble owing to the poison contained in the vapours they try to dispose of in secrecy."

His startling successes had all been based upon the recognition of this fundamental fact. "But," as he said, "instead of these people keeping well through the ordinary exercise of their religion, they have, owing to their absurd Protestant beliefs, to pay me through the nose for providing them with a scientific instead of a sacerdotal confessional box."

Nevertheless, the hard work was beginning to tell, and as he waited for St. Maur and recalled the circumstances of Mrs. Delarayne's visit, it struck him that it would not be unwise to avail himself of that lady's need of him in order perhaps to take a short holiday.

Truth to tell, he was a little satiated with Society's nervous wrecks.

You cannot hold your nose for long over any kind of smoke without being nauseated; but the fumes which men and women have tried to consume themselves, and failed, have this peculiarity, that they are perhaps more foetid, more unsavoury, more asphyxiating, than any that can be produced by the combustion of the most obnoxious and malodorous chemicals.

St. Maur observed his friend's condition as he entered the room.

"Hard day?" he enquired.

"Very."

"I thought so. Cheques have been coming in pretty plentifully too. Any celebrities?"

"One M.P. and one Canon,--the rest ordinary, or rather extraordinary men and women. But don't let us talk about it; my stomach's turned as it is. I'm going to take a few days' holiday, Aubrey."

St. Maur in his astonishment had to sit down.

"Mrs. Delarayne has just been here. Her daughter seems to be an interesting case of self-surrender and inversion of reproductive instinct owing to repeated rebuffs. She is now at the self-immolating stage. Rather dangerous. Falls about. Her knees give way. Might cut her head open. Great struggle for supremacy apparently with flapper sister.

Both passionate girls, of course. Only thrown up sponge after hard and unsuccessful fight. Local doctor orders iron, quinine, and strychnine.

It's a wonder he didn't order brimstone and treacle. Mother doesn't understand the condition at all, but is sufficiently wise to suspect that the behaviour of a certain young man with fascinating flapper sister may be contributory."

"Can't she come here?" asked St. Maur.

"Well, she could. But it is one of those cases in which, if I want to do any real good, I must watch conditions on the spot."

"When do you leave?"

"In an hour or two. The car's coming to fetch me."

He rose, looked down with grave disapproval at his baggy trousers, and flicked a speck or two of dust from his jacket.

"Aubrey, dear boy, I want you to make me look smart,--do you think it can be managed?" He smiled in his irresistible way, and St. Maur had to laugh too. "You evidently think it quite impossible," he added.

"No, not at all, you ass!" St. Maur objected. "I'm always telling you that you can look the smartest man in England if you choose. You fellows who are habitually dowdy create a most tremendous effect when, for once, you really dress in a rational fashion."

Lord Henry scratched his head and glanced dubiously down at his clothes again.

"I suppose these would do," he said.

St. Maur expostulated with scorn. "Where are all your things? You've got some presentable clothes, only you never wear them; or if you do, you wear the wrong ties or the wrong shirts, or the wrong socks with them."

"Have you got your crow's nest here?" Lord Henry demanded.