"It's only au revoir," Jimmy said, as he shook hands at the railway carriage door.
Miss Farlow smiled brightly. "That's all. I am coming down again very soon. Father is going away for a couple of months' holiday; and, as he is taking my younger sister, Florence, Ethel has made me promise to come down here. She is awfully good-hearted, isn't she?"
Jimmy nodded emphatically. "She is indeed. One of the best I know."
As the train steamed out of the station, he stood a full minute deep in thought, staring at it until it disappeared round a slight curve; then he turned to find the doctor watching him with a grim smile.
"Hullo, Grierson," the old man said. "I've hardly seen you lately, only caught glimpses of you whizzing past in a motor, surrounded by millinery." Then he scanned the other's face critically. "You're looking better. Found the cure for it, eh? I always thought that both the reason and the remedy would prove to wear skirts."
Jimmy flushed awkwardly. He did not altogether admire Dr. Gregg's frankness; and yet he was grateful for the implied testimony to his reformation, so he answered with a laugh, and, after a few minutes' conversation, willingly consented to go up to dinner at the doctor's that night. After all, it would be dull alone in the cottage, and he knew that Ethel would not want him, as she, too, was dining out.
The doctor was an old bachelor, or at least the town assumed him to be one. True, when he had first bought the practice, thirty years previously, he had made no definite statement on the matter; and, for a time, people had shaken their heads, and, on that purely negative evidence, had done what they called "drawing their own conclusions." His wife had run away from him, and they would hear of her one day, in connection with some scandal, and she would allege, and probably prove, that he had ill-used her. However, as months went by, and they did not hear—in fact they never heard anything—they admitted they had been wrong, and began to pity him as the husband of an incurable lunatic, who was confined in an asylum near London. But even that story had died a lingering death from sheer want of nourishment, and long before Jimmy had appeared in the neighbourhood, even the mothers' meetings had ceased to discuss the doctor's private affairs. He was just the gruff and well-beloved friend of everyone in the place, a man of whom even the preacher in the Peculiar People's chapel spoke with respect.
"Old friends of yours at Drylands, after all?" the doctor asked abruptly, as they sat smoking in his study after dinner.
Jimmy nodded. "Yes, you got the name wrong, you see, and, naturally, I didn't recognise it. I've known the Grimmers, or at least Mrs. Grimmer, all my life."
"It's a bad thing to get out of touch with people you know," the other went on. "A very bad thing. Never have a family quarrel, if you can avoid it, Grierson, or, rather, never have another."