Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/92

82 "There is something in that idea," responded the older man slowly; "It is always difficult to get a just impression of anyone who is made self-conscious beforehand. Why do you not come to-night? She will suspect nothing."

"Excellent!" Hilliard rose. "You say that Dr. Young sounded her lungs and Carter her heart?"

Mr. Bagehot nodded.

The young man took up his hat. "I will then go." He bowed. "I had expected to pay two visits this evening. I must get them in this afternoon, so if you will excuse me"

The older man also rose and went to the door with him. "At what hour is your affair?" The Doctor stopped in the hall.

"Eight-thirty—nine—whenever you like," and they bowed and parted.

It was a warm night in May; there must have been a garden somewhere in the neighborhood, for a waft of scent came in the open window. Hilliard shut with a bang a musty book he had been reading and, springing to his feet, stretched his long arms.

"Ho for a night in the gay world!" he said to himself with the sardonic smile with which he viewed human weakness in himself as in others, a smile with which, however, he did not favor his patients, and then he proceeded to dress.

Being intensely practical, orderly, and hard-working, he usually allowed himself very little time for "gew-gaws," as he called clothes, and "flummery," as he called society, but he had a passion for the sensuous side of life which he recognized and held in check.

To take a bath and shave at eight o'clock at night, to spend time over the brushing of his too curly black hair, to put on his dress clothes, adjust a flower in his button-hole—this filled an hour of extreme luxury and enjoyment, and he gave another of his contemptuous grins as he stared at himself in the glass.

He had studied women exhaustively as patients, as women he had avoided them carefully since his college days, when he had discovered his ready appreciation of their power. Through the force of a conscience which he kept studiously concealed, and an ambition in which he gloried, he had succeeded in letting them signally alone.

It was not the women he looked forward to even now, it was the garden, the lights among the trees, the music; he knew what easy enchantment these things could work on him, and he felt like a schoolboy on a lark.

With his light overcoat over his arm he strolled along till he reached Mr. Bagehot's great house, which loomed in the quiet street like a Florentine palace, and, entering the door, he already caught sounds of