James Murchison, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the clock struck eight, finding in this stern routine a power to steady him against despair. He slipped off his overcoat, folded it slowly and methodically over the back of a bench, and hung his hat on one of the gas brackets projecting from the wall. To John Tugler, who was seated at one of the tables, examining a girl with a red rash covering her face, there was something in the big man’s slow and restrained patience that betrayed how sorrow was shadowing his assistant’s home.

John Tugler pushed back his chair, and crossed the room to the corner where Murchison was bending over his open instrument bag. The droop of the shoulders, the whole pose of the powerful figure, told of the burden that lay heavy upon the father’s heart.

“Murchison.”

The face that met John Tugler’s was haggard and stupid with two sleepless nights.

“Yes.”

“Any news?”

“Oh—worse,” and he snapped the bag to with an irritable closure of the hands.

John Tugler looked at him as he might have looked at a refractory friend.

“Come now, Murchison, you’re feeling damned bad. Knock off to-day. Stileman and I can manage.”

“Thanks. I must work.”

“Must, eh?”

“It helps.”

“Like punching something when you’re savage. Perhaps you’re right.”

Tugler returned to the girl with the red rash, while Murchison passed on to the surgery, where some half-score patients were waiting to be treated.

“Good-morning,” and he glanced round him like a man in a hurry; “first case. Well, how’s the leg?”

A scraggy, undersized individual with a narrow, swarthy face was pulling up a trousers leg with two dirty, drug-stained hands. He was a worker in a chemical factory, and his ugly, harsh, and suspicious features seemed to have taken the low moral stamp of the place.

“No worse, doct’r.”

“No worse! Well, have you been resting?”

“Half an’ half.”

“I suppose so. You may as well come here and grumble for months unless you do what we tell you. It is quite useless continuing like this.”

He bent down and began to unwind the dirty bandage from the man’s leg. The chemical worker expanded the broad nostrils of his carnivorous nose, sniffed, and cocked a battered bowler onto the back of his head. Manners were not mended in Dr. Tugler’s surgery.

“God’s truth, doct’r, easy with it—”

Murchison had stripped a sodden pad of lint and plaster from the ulcer on the man’s leg.

“Nonsense; that didn’t hurt you.”

“Beg to differ, sir.”

“When did you dress this last?”

The patient hesitated, eying Murchison sulkily as though tempted to be insolent.

“Yesterday.”

“Speak the truth and say three days ago. You’re on your ‘club’—of course.”

“Well, what’s the harm?”

“And you don’t trouble much how long you draw club-money, eh?”

“That’s your business, I reckon.”

“My business, is it? Well, my friend, you carry out my instructions or there will be trouble about the certificate. You understand?”

The man cast an evil look at Murchison’s broad back as he turned to spread boracic ointment on clean lint.

“I don’t know as how I come here to hear your sauce,” he remarked, curtly.

Murchison faced him with an irritable glitter of the eyes.

“What do you mean!”

“I suppose some of us poor fellows cost you gentlemen too much in tow and flannel.”

“There you are just a little at sea, my friend. What we do is to prevent the Friendly Societies being imposed upon by loafers. Dress your leg every day. Rest it, you understand, and keep out of the pubs. You had better come by some manners before next week.”

The chemical worker snarled out some vague retort, and then relapsed into silence. Such shufflers had no pity from James Murchison. He was in no mood that morning to bear with the impertinences of malingerers and humbugs.

The clock struck eleven before the last patient passed out into Wilton High Street with its thundering drays and clanging trams. Murchison had done the work of two men in the surgery that morning, silent, skilful, and determined, a man who worked that the savage smart of sorrow might be soothed and assuaged thereby. With the women and the children he was very gentle and very patient. His hands were never rough and never clumsy. Perhaps none of the people whose wounds he dressed guessed how bitter a wound was bleeding in the heart of this sad-eyed, patient-faced man.

John Tugler sidled in when Murchison had pinned up the last bandage. He swung the door to gently, sighed, and pretended to examine the entries in the ledger. Murchison was washing his hands at the sink, staring hard at the water as it splashed from the tap upon his fingers.

“Not much visiting to-day.”

“No.”

“I’ll hire a cab, and drive down to Black End. Most of them seem to lie that way.”

Murchison was looking for a clean place in the roller-towel.

“I can manage the visiting down there,” he said.

John Tugler surveyed him attentively over a fat shoulder.

“You’ll knock up, old man,” he remarked, quietly.

Murchison started. The familiarity had a touch of tenderness that lifted it from its vulgar setting.

“Thanks, no.”

“Very bad, is she?”

“Comatose.”

“Oh, damn!”

The little man whipped over the leaves of the ledger, as though looking for something that he could not find.

“It seems a beastly shame,” he said, presently.

“Shame?”

“Yes, this sort of smash-up of a youngster’s life. They call it Providence, or the Divine Will, or something of that sort, don’t they? Must say I can’t stick that sort of bosh.”

Murchison was wringing his hands fiercely in the folds of the rough towel.

“It is a natural judgment, I suppose,” he said.

“A judgment?”

“It was my............