Mr. Hobhouse laughed pleasantly, and inwardly he laughed still more pleasantly, for his shot came off.
"So have I," agreed the doctor, and there was no doubt that he was in earnest.
Mr. Hobhouse decided that he had probed the matter sufficiently for the present, and with what he was now beginning to consider his usual tact he changed the subject.
Before they parted that night he could not resist one touch of art despite the counsels of Sir Francis.
"Before we go to bed, doctor," he said, with his most ingratiating smile, "do you think one little drop would do us any harm? I feel as though I might have a little cold coming on—"
But the doctor was shaking his head, kindly but firmly.
"Well, well, better not; I quite agree with you, doctor," gushed his guest. "Good-night, doctor. Good-night!"
"I wonder if the doctor ever had such a blinkin' ass in his house before!" said the amiable gentleman to himself as he shut his bed-room door behind him.
Looking at myself in the glass with a kind of chastened complacence, I decided that the man who could perceive in Mr. Hobhouse any reminiscence of the mysterious young stranger of six months ago would have a singularly piercing eye. At the same time it was a sobering experience to gaze at that black-bearded gentleman, with his hair parted in the middle and brushed low down over his forehead, and his foolish looking pince-nezs, and reflect that there was no artificial difference between him and the vanished Roger Merton save those eye-glasses and a little hair dye. That was my own face, and my own hair, and, I presumed, my own natural latent idiocy blinking behind those glasses. I turned away from the mirror with mingled feelings.
As the hour was not late (early to bed being part of the cure), I put on my dressing gown and sat down to smoke and chew the cud of my evening's conversation with Dr. Rendall. The more I saw of him, the more favourably on the whole the man impressed me. He was a gentleman and seemed a good fellow. Being a bachelor with outdoor tastes and an easygoing disposition, it was not at all impossible to understand his choosing the estate of his family to settle down on, isolated though it was. Certainly one could not honestly charge it against him as a suspicious circumstance.