Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/194

190 half-glass door that communicates with the little back parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to some one within.

"If I go over the water to-night, Bell—" he says.

A feminine voice from within interrupts him—"But you won't go to-night, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher's, Mrs. Tompkins's little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear, that they say if you'd only stay at home always, you'd have the best practice in the neighbourhood."

"But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and perhaps half his time only sell a penn'orth of salts or a poor man's plaster? If they'd be ill," he added, almost savagely, "I wouldn't mind stopping in; there's some interest in that. Or if they'd come and have their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I'm sure I sell 'em our Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don't make 'em have their teeth out, nothing will."

"Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin."

Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness.

The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus Darley's only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she can make up a prescription—nay, has been known to draw a juvenile patient's first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs.

Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school or the drawing-room, might call "fast." But when it is taken into consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother's friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments, and "go-ahead" in her opinions, than some others of her sex.

The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room had been filled with visitors,