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Rh and Lushington have each young partners or assistants, straight from London hospitals, smelling of iodoform, talking in abstruse medical or surgical terms, nosing for operations, as dogs for truffles. You don't want me to have any of these, do you?"

"I want you to do what you please, now and always."

"Even if it pleases me that Peter Kennedy should medicine and make love to me?"

"Even that. Does he make love to you?"

"What did he tell you?"

"That he adored you—that you treated him like a dog."

"He gives me amyl, bromide. He was only a country practitioner when I first knew him, with a gift for music, but not for diagnosis."

"And now?"

"He has done more reading, medical reading, since I have been here than in all his life before. Treatises on the heart; all that have ever been written. He is really studying, he intends to take a higher degree. In music too, I have given him an impetus."

Gabriel was obviously, nevertheless, not quite satisfied, started a tentative "but," and would perhaps have enquired whether ultimately it would be for Peter Kennedy's good that she had done so much for him. Anne, however, intervened, coming