An increased sallowness and a slight thinning of the hair were the only changes that might have been noticed in Parker Steel that spring. The characteristic symptoms had been slight and evanescent, the “rash” so faint and transient that a delicate dusting of powder had hidden it even from Mrs. Betty’s eyes. A few of his most intimate friends had noticed that Parker Steel had the tense, strained look of a man suffering from overwork. That he had given up his nightly cigar and his wine, pointed also to the fact that the physician had knowledge of his own needs.

To such a man as Steel the zest of life lay in the energetic stir and ostentatious bustle of success. His conceit was in his cleverness, in the smartness of his equipage and reputation, and in the flattering gossip that haunts a healer’s name. Parker Steel was essentially a selfish mortal, and selfish men are often the happiest, provided they succeed.

Yet no man, however selfish, can wholly stifle his own thoughts. That the silence he kept was an immoral silence, no man knew better than did Parker Steel. People would have shrunk from him had they known the truth, as a refined woman shrinks from the offensive carcass of a drunken tramp. His own niceness of taste revolted from the consciousness of chance and undeserved pollution. Ambition was strong in him, however, and the cold tenacity to hold what he had gained. More isolated than Selkirk on his island, he had to bear the bitterness of it alone, knowing that sympathy was locked out by silence.

The supreme trying of his powers of hypocrisy came for him in his attitude towards his wife. Parker Steel was in no sense an uxorious fellow, and neither he nor Betty were ever demonstrative towards each other. An occasional half-perfunctory meeting of the lips had satisfied both after the first year of marriage. For this reason Parker Steel’s ordeal was less complex and severe than if he had had to repulse an emotional and warm-blooded woman.

The first diplomatic development had been insomnia; at least that was the excuse he made to Betty when he chose to sleep alone in his dressing-room at the back of the house. The faintest sound disturbed him, so he protested, and the rattle of wheels over the cobbles of the Square kept him irritably sleepless in the early hours of the morning. To Betty Steel there was no inconsistency in the excuse he gave. She thought him worried and overworked, and there was abundant justification for the latter evil. Winter and early spring are the briskest seasons of a doctor’s life. Dr. Steel had had seven severe cases of pneumonia on his list one week.

“You are too much in demand, Parker,” she had said. “There is always the possibility of a partner to be considered.”

“Thanks, no; I am not a believer in a co-operative business.”

“You must take a jaunt somewhere as soon as the work slackens.”

“All in good time, dear.”

“Sicily is fashionable.”

Parker Steel had indulged in optimistic reflections to distract her vigilance. She had sought to prove that he was in stale health by remarking that the wound on his forefinger had not completely healed. He was still wearing the finger-stall that covered the fons et origo mali.

“There is absolutely no need for you to fuss about me,” he had answered; “I am not made of iron, and the work tells. Three thousand a year is not earned without worry.”

“As much as that, Parker?”

He had touched a susceptible passion in her.

“Perhaps more. We shall be able to call our own tune before we are five-and-forty.”

“Heaven defend us, Parker, you hint at terrible things. Respectable obesity, and morning prayers.”

Her husband had laughed, and given her plausible comfort.

“You will be more dangerous then than you are now,” he had said.

In truth, their fortunes were very much in the ascendant, and the social side of professional life had prospered in Mrs. Betty’s hands. The brunette was supreme in Roxton so far as beauty was concerned, supreme also in the yet more magic elements of graceful savoir-faire and tact. She was one of those women who had learned to charm by flattery without seeming to be a sycophant; moreover, she had tested the wisdom of propitiating her own sex by appearing even more amiable to women than to men. Since the passing of the Murchisons she had had nothing in the way of rivalry to fear. True, two “miserable squatters” had put up brass plates in the town, and scrambled for some of the poorer of James Murchison’s patients. Mrs. Betty had been able to call upon the wives with patronizing magnanimity. They were both rather dusty, round-backed ladies, with no pretensions to style, either in their own persons or in the persons of their husbands. One of these professional gentlemen, a huge and flat-faced Paddy, resembled a police constable in plain clothes. The other was rather a meek young man in glasses, destitute of any sense of humor, and very useful in the Sunday-school.

Roxton had weathered Lent and Easter, and Lady Sophia Gillingham, Dame President of the local habitation of the Primrose League; patroness of all Roxton charities, Dissenting enterprises excepted; and late lady-in-waiting to the Queen; had called her many dear friends together to discuss the coming Midsummer Bazaar that was held annually for the benefit of the Roxton Cottage Hospital. Roxton, like the majority of small country towns, was a veritable complexity of cliques, and by “Roxton” should be understood the superior people who were unionists in politics, and Church Christians in religio............