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especially when he had found out that Marion’s dress allowance from her father was actually more than twice what he would be earning as a houseman but Marion’s father, although never in favour of the marriage, had been prepared to indulge his daughter until such times, and it could only be sooner rather than later, that Saracen became a successful consultant. When Saracen suddenly found himself having to take any job that he could get, invariably junior posts in unpopular specialities in third rate hospitals, things began to change.
    There had never been a big scene between Marion and himself. Instead, Marion had started seeing more of her old friends, taking advantage of the legion of admirers ever willing to wine and dine her while her husband worked all the hours that God sent. Being Marion she had always been quite open about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do and, for her, it was. Saracen had been sad but, strangely, never angry. He had tried to keep a beautiful butterfly in a net and that had been against the laws of nature.
    What bitterness and anger there was in the situation came between Saracen and his father-in-law and it was to prove final. Saracen stubbornly refused all offers of financial help to set himself up in private practice, having resolved to rehabilitate himself in ‘real’ medicine rather than pander to the, often imagined, ills of the rich. It was an attitude that Marion’s father could not accept and Saracen could never fully explain but what relationship they had, and it was never very good, foundered over it. Marion’s father had set out to break up the marriage and recover his daughter from the ‘failure’ she had wed.
    Apart from being an inveterate snob Saracen’s father-in-law was a clever and devious man, as befitting his profession, and he had succeeded in distancing Marion from Saracen in a number of seemingly innocent but effective ways. Marion’s mother had died some two years before and her father’s need for a woman to play diplomatic hostess was used to the full. He managed to persuade Marion more and more to accompany him on trips abroad until finally she just wasn’t there at all.
     
    In the interim, Saracen had moved three times, changing from one dingy little flat to another, the fate that his father-in-law had prophesied for him, as he took the only jobs in medicine that were left open to him. Accident and Emergency Units were rapidly becoming ‘his thing’ largely because working in them was so unpopular with his contemporaries. The hours were appalling, the work more often social than medical and the prospect of advancement practically nil. Consultancies in A&E were rarer than hen’s teeth.
     
    In his own mind Saracen bitterly regretted having exposed the short-comings of John MacBryde, not because of what had happened to himself over it, but because the consequences for MacBryde had far outweighed the crime. All the good that the man had done had been wiped out and forgotten. He would only be remembered as a cheat. The man had been destroyed and he, James Saracen would have it on his conscience for the rest of his life.
    It had been two years since Saracen had last seen Marion and he had come to terms with the fact that his marriage was over. The hurt and pain had even cleared enough for him to be able to see the faults in his wife that love had made him blind to for so long. Like many beautiful things she lacked substance, she was weak, fragile, ephemeral and now she was gone.
    The loss of Marion and deep self criticism over the MacBryde affair had led to Saracen becoming something of an expert in human nature and his own personality had changed accordingly. He had become a loner, a spectator at the game rather than a participant. No longer fettered or driven by professional or social ambition he had discovered the practise of medicine for its own sake and, in that; he found a satisfaction beyond all expectation.
    This fact seemed to