He rose.
“Thank you very much,” St. Quentin said. “Come back to luncheon, and tell that poor fellow, when you see him next, that it’s—all right.”
Hugh went through the Park and down the village, where cottages of a greatly improved kind were rising rapidly in place of the old ones. The thinning trees of the Park told at what cost this long-neglected duty was performed.
He soon reached the charming, roomy redbrick Queen Anne house where Dr. Lorry lived, and was receiving the heartiest of welcomes from his old friend in the quaint, dark, comfortable dining-room.
“My dear boy, this is capital!—capital, I say! I am quite delighted. You must put in a few days with me now you’re here, for all your patients will be clamouring to see you. I get nothing but enquiries after ‘Dr. Hugh.’ You’ve quite taken the wind out of my sails here, I can tell you, and that little rascal Pauly—‘I want Dr. Hugh,’ he cries, whenever I go up to physic him!”
“I see you are still a famous story-teller, sir,” Hugh said, laughing.
“Ah! in my anecdotage,” chuckled the old doctor. “A friend I hadn’t seen for thirty years came home the other day from Africa, and looked me up. ‘Why, you hardly look a day older, Lorry!’ he said, ‘and I quite expected to find you in your dotage!’”
“‘The stage before it—anecdotage, Tom!’” I said. “I thought he would have died!”
“A good many stages still before it, I take leave to think!” Hugh said.
“No, no. I’m getting old, my boy, and thinking of retiring,” said the doctor. “Little Pauly isn’t far wrong when he cries out for a younger man!”