When Luke arrived at his uncle's house early the next morning, he was met in the hall by Doctor Newington, who was descending the stairs and who gravely beckoned to the young man to follow him into the library.
"They called me in last night," he said in reply to Luke's quick and anxious query. "The butler—or whatever he may be—told me that he was busy fastening up the front door preparatory to going to bed when he heard a heavy thud proceeding from the library. He found his master lying full length on the floor: the head had come in violent contact, as he fell, with the corner of this table; blood was trickling from a scalp wound, and Lord Radclyffe himself was apparently in a swoon. The man is a regular coward and a fool besides. He left his master lying just as he had fallen, but fortunately he knew me and knew where to find me, and within ten minutes I was on the spot, and had got Lord Radclyffe into bed."
"Is it," asked Luke, "anything serious?"
"Lord Radclyffe has not been over strong lately. He has had a great deal to put up with, and at his age the system is not sufficiently elastic or—how shall I put it?—sufficiently recuperative to stand either constant nerve strain or nagging worries."
"I don't know," interposed Luke stiffly, "that my uncle has had either nerve strain or worry to put up with."
"Oh," rejoined the doctor, whose gruff familiarity seemed to Luke's sensitive ear to be tainted with the least possible note of impertinence, "I am an old friend of your uncle, you know, and of all your family; there isn't much that has escaped my observation during the past year."
"You have not yet told me, doctor," said Luke, a shade more stiffly than before, "what is the matter with Lord Radclyffe."
There was distinct emphasis on the last two words.
Doctor Newington shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly.
"Your uncle has had something in the nature of a stroke," he said bluntly, and he fixed keen light-coloured eyes on those of Luke, watching the effect which the news—baldly and crudely put—would have on the young man's nerves. He was a man with what is known as a fashionable practice. He lived in Hertford Street and his rounds were encircled by the same boundaries as those of the rest of Mayfair. He had had plenty of opportunity of studying those men and women who compose the upper grades of English society. They and their perfect sang-froid, their well-drilled calm under the most dire calamities, or most unexpected blows had often caused him astonishment when he was a younger man, fresh from hospital work, and from the haunts of humbler folk, who had no cause or desire to hide the depth of their feelings. Now he was used to his fashionable patients and had ceased to wonder, and Luke's impassiveness on hearing of his uncle's sudden illness did not necessarily strike him as indifference.