“What sort of a man is he—young or old?”
“By my opinion, sir, ’e’s too young. I don’t ’old by them young doctors. Now Dr Smith, sir——”
“Dr Twiddel is quite a young man, then?”
“What I’d call little better than a boy, sir. They tell me they lets ’em loose very young nowadays.”
“About twenty-five, say?”
“’E might be that, sir; but I don’t know much about ’im, sir. Now Dr Smith, sir, ’e’s different.”
In fact at this point Mrs Gabbon showed such a tendency [pg 192] to turn the conversation back to the merits of Dr Smith and the precise nature of Mr Bunker’s ailment, that her lodger, in despair, requested her to bring up a cup of tea as speedily as possible.
“Before the middle of November,” he said to himself. “It is certainly a curious coincidence.”
To a gentleman of Mr Bunker’s sociable habits and active mind, the prospect of sitting day by day in the company of his theological treatises and talkative landlady, and watching an apparently uninhabited house, seemed at first sight even less entertaining than a return to Clankwood. But, as he said of himself, he possessed a kind of easy workaday philosophy, and, besides that, an apparently irresistible attraction for the incidents of life.
He had barely finished his cup of tea, and was sitting over the fire smoking one of the Baron’s cigars and looking through one of the few books he had brought that bore no relation to divinity, his feet high upon the side of the mantelpiece, his ready-made costume perhaps a little more unbuttoned than the strictest propriety might approve, and a stiff glass of whisky-and-water at his elbow, when there came a rap at his door.