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shop, well content to leave Mary to damp the exasperating flutter into which the news had thrown her relatives. Well, no, he wouldn't say that: in Mother even this was bearable. It was true, declaring you might knock her down with a feather, she had seated herself heavily in her chair by the fire, to think and talk over the plan in detail. But her cheery old mind saw only the bright side of it; while her kindly, humorous smile took the sting from fuss and curiosity. Lisby was harder to repress. She threw up her hands. "No! never did I hear tell of such a thing, Polly -- I would say Mary! Going off to buy a practice, my dear, for all the world as if it were a tooth-brush or a cravat!" Richard safely out of the house, Mary felt constrained to come to his defence.
    "You must remember, Lisby, it doesn't seem quite such an important affair to Richard as it does to you. With all his experience. Living in the colony, too, one learnt to make up one's mind quickly. You had to. Think of shares, for instance. They might be all right when you went to bed, and by the morning have sunk below par; so that you had to decide there and then whether to sell out or risk holding on." The mild amusement with which Richard's behaviour provided Lisby was apt to jar on Mary.
    From the chemist Mahony got all the information he wanted -- and more. The object of his visit grasped, he was led into a dingy little parlour behind the shop, where, amid an overflow of jars and bottles and drawer-cases, Bealby carried on his ex-business life. And both doors noiselessly closed to ensure their privacy, the chemist -- a rubicund, paunchy old man, with snow-white hair and whiskers -- himself grew so private that he spoke only in a whisper, and accompanied his words with a forefinger laid flat along his nose. This mysterious air gave the impression that he was divulging dark secrets; though he had no secret to tell, nor would his hearer have thanked him for any. Plainly he was a rare old gossip, and as such made the most both of his subject and the occasion. Mahony could neither dam nor escape from his flow of talk. However, his account of the practice was so favourable that the rest had just to be swallowed -- even disagreeable tittle-tattle about the old surgeon's mode of life. At the plum kept to the last -- Brocklebank, it appeared, had actually been called in professionally to the great house of the district, Castle Bellevue -- Mahony could not repress a smile; Bealby alluding to it with a reverence that would have befitted a religious rite. Of more practical importance was the information that there were already two candidates for the practice in the field; but that to these, he, Mahony, would no doubt be preferred; for both were young men, just about to start. And: "We want no fledglings, no young sawbones in a position such as this, sir! Now with an elderly man like yourself. . ." Wincing, Mahony contrived soon after to let slip the fact that he was but a couple of years over forty.
    "His eyes almost jumped out of his head when I said it, Mary. The fellow had evidently put me down for sixty or thereabouts," he came back on the incident that night. "It made me feel I must be beginning to look a very old man."
    "Not old, Richard. Only rather delicate. And the people here are all so rosy and sturdy that they don't understand any one being pale and thin."
    "Well, I'm positive he thought me a contemporary, if not just of old B.'s, at least of his own."
    What he did not mention to Mary was the impression he saw he left Bealby under, that lack of success had been the reason of his quitting Australia. Were he only more skilled at blowing his own trumpet! Actually the old fool seemed to think he, Mahony, would be bettering himself by settling in Leicester!
    "Well, sir, I can promise you, you will find an old-established, first-class practice, such as this, a very different thing from those you have been used to. England, doctor, old England! There's no place like