“Like them! I envy you the ownership more than I can say. If anything can make me sorry that I am not a lawyer it would be the fact that I can’t live in the Temple. We doctors have no distinctive abode, nothing associated with the past.”
“Perhaps that is because medicine is essentially a progressive science.”
“Is it? Sometimes I begin to doubt if it has made any progress since Galen—or Albertus Magnus. I will admit that there was progress of some kind up to his time.”
“This house has an interest for me that it would have for no one else,” said Theodore, presently, while his friend filled his briar-wood. “My kinsman, Lord Cheriton, occupied the rooms underneath these for about a dozen years; and it is a fancy of mine to keep his image before me as I sit here alone with my books. It reminds me of what a man can do in the profession which so many of my friends declare to be hopeless.”
“No one knows anything about it, Theodore. If you went into statistics you would find that the chances of success in the learned professions are pretty nearly equal. So many men will get on, and so many will fail, at every trade, in every calling. The faculty of success lies in the man himself. I always thought you were the kind of man to do well in whatever line you hit upon. A calm, clear brain and a resolute will are the first factors in the sum of life. And so Lord Cheriton lived in this house, did he? I have heard people talk of him as a very distinguished man, as well as a very lucky one. By-the-by, it was in his house that strange murder occurred last year.”
“Yes, it was in his house, and it was his daughter’s husband who was murdered.”
“Tell me the story, Theodore,” said Ramsay, leaning back his handsome head, and half closing his eyes, with the air of a man who liked hearing about murders. “I read the account in the papers at the time, but I’ve very nearly forgotten all about it.”
Theodore complied, and gave his friend the history of the case, and the failure of every attempt to find the murderer.
“And there has been nothing discovered since last summer?”
“Nothing!”