But the Bishop, recently wedded for the third time, took leave, accepting his host’s offer of dropping him at his hotel, and the pair got into fur coats and a snug ante-brougham and drove away together. Soon after, somebody from the Chancery Buildings came with an urgent summons for the King’s Counsel, and he melted away with regrets, and the Highgate Doctor sat in the luxurious consulting-room, and started at every stoppage of swift wheels in the streets.
The silent servants came and looked to the fire, the Pompadour clock upon the mantel chimed eleven! And then, looking up out of a brown study, the Highgate Doctor saw his host returned, and started at his worn and haggard aspect. As the demure servant relieved him of his coat and hat, and vanished, the Distinguished Surgeon dropped into an easy-chair and sat shading his face with the right hand, whose steadiness he had so vaunted. And that infallible, unerring hand shook as if with palsy.
The Highgate Doctor could bear no more....
“O man,� he said—in moments of excitement his accent savored of from north of the Tweed—“dinna sit glowering and shaking there! I ken weel what has happened! Your pride has got the killing thrust; she is in her death-pangs at this minute I’m talking, and you stand face to face wi’ One you have denied! Am I richt or no?�
The Distinguished Surgeon moved the shaking hand and said, not in the calm level tone the Highgate Doctor knew, but one jerky and uneven:
“You are right! You shall know the truth, though it places my reputation at your mercy....�
“Forget your reputation a meenute,� said the Highgate Doctor. “As to Case One Thousand and One ... is the woman dead?�
“No ...� said the other—“no, I reached the Hospital in time ... we called up the chart-nurse and the Matron, had her taken up to the theater and——�
“Found that ye had bungled—for once in your life!� said the Highgate Doctor. “And weel for you, if not for your patient, that it is so. The ligature had slipped, I take it, being insecurely tied?�
The Distinguished Surgeon looked him steadily between the eyes and answered: