Dr. Oliver Birnie’s consulting-room was generally pretty full in the morning, and always with paying patients. He had long since passed the ‘super’ stage of the profession. Lest any intelligent reader should be unacquainted with this phase of medical practice, let mo explain that it is the custom when young doctors are anxious to work up a reputation for being fashionable for them to engage a few supers—that is, to give advice gratis to a few selected persons, on condition that they come once or twice a week and help to make a crowd in the waiting-room.

A doctor’s house, like a theatre, must be crowded if the proprietor would have a success. An empty waiting-room is like an empty pit; it dispirits the clientÈle. Let a patient have to wait a couple of hours, and he considers the doctor a great man; let him find himself alone, and be shown in directly, and he imagines that the medical man can’t be clever or he would be busier.

Dr. Birnie was at home for consultation till twelve, and his rooms were generally crowded with genuine patients. They were, naturally, well-dressed, well-to-do people, for his fee was high. One morning, as the ladies and gentlemen at Dr. Birnie’s sat glaring at each other amid the funereal silence which generally reigns in a doctor’s waiting-room, the door opened, and a rough, hulking old man was shown in by the solemn attendant. He was about six feet, and broad in proportion, his hair and beard were grizzled, and his face was bronzed with exposure. He wasn’t a nice-looking old gentleman at all, and his get-up did not improve his appearance. He wore a thick pilot jacket, which was anything but a fit, and round his throat was twisted a dirty white comforter. He took off his hat as he entered the room, and sidled awkwardly to a chair, sitting on the extreme edge, and eyeing the company nervously. At first the ladies and gentlemen wondered what such a huge, powerful fellow could possibly want with a doctor. They imagined he must be a navvy, or something of the sort, and they felt it was like his impudence to come and sit down in their presence. But presently the great frame was racked, the fierce face became crimson, and the silence of the waiting-room was broken by the violent coughing of the new-comer.

That a man with a cough like that should need medical advice the ladies and gentlemen understood, but their astonishment was great when the door opened and the solemn attendant beckoned to this ‘navigator’ to come out.

The idea of the doctor taking such a person out of his turn!

It was strange, certainly, but Dr. Birnie had done it, and when the rough-looking fellow was shown into his consulting-room, he held out his hand, and exclaimed, quite familiarly, ‘Well, Josh, wherever have you turned up from?’

Then Mr. Josh Heckett told Dr. Birnie a long story, beginning in England, then going to Australia, and coming back to England again, and the said story ended on the banks of the Serpentine.

‘Good gracious me!’ said the doctor. ‘And you mean to say that Marston deliberately tried to murder you?’

‘I do by———!’ exclaimed Heckett, bringing his fist down on the table till the surgical instruments danced again; ‘and he’s done it, except as it’s a slow death ‘stid of a quick un. I ain’t been the same man, guv’nor, since that there night. It’s the wettin’ and the cold as done it. This ‘ere corf don’t give me no rest night nor day.’

Dr. Birnie put something to the old man’s chest and listened, then he put his ear to his back and made him draw his breath, and then the doctor’s face assumed a grave, profound look.

‘Hem!’ he said; ‘that’s bad. You ought to have come to me before. How long have you had this cough?’

‘Soon arter the duckin’ it come on, and it’s got wus and wus. I bought no end o’ lozengers and things off the barrers, as they sez cures a corf in no time; but they didn’t do me a bit o’ good. So I thought as I’d find you out and see if you could set me right. I ain’t bothered you for a good many years now.’

‘Well, Josh, I’ll see what I can do for you, but you must be careful. You’d better keep indoors as much as you can, and I’ll give you a prescription.’

The doctor wrote something on a piece of paper, and handed it to Josh.

‘You’ll get that made up at any chemist’s,’ he said. ‘Let me see you again in a week.’

Josh took his prescription and thanked the doctor; but before he went he told him a portion of another little story, and, carried away by his excitement, he even went so far as to let the doctor into the details of a little scheme of vengeance which he was brewing against a man whom the doctor in days gone by had once known exceedingly well.

The doctor was so interested in the story that he let Josh talk on for ever so long, utterly oblivions of the ladies and gentlemen drumming their heels in the waiting-room.

And when Josh was gone he didn’t send for a fresh patient at once, but sat for a few minutes buried in thought.

‘I wonder what to do for the best,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘I suspect Gurth would like to be in at the death, and it’s all up with Edward Marston. He need fear nothing in that quarter now. Yes, I think Gurth had better come.’

That morning, when all the patients were disposed of, Dr. Birnie started out on his round of visits.

But the first thing he did was to send a telegraphic message to America:

‘From Birnie, London, to Egerton, ———— Hotel, New York.—Come back. The game is yours. M. is trapped.’

Josh Heckett’s cough grew worse and worse. Bess and George were still with him, and very grateful they were for the means of avoiding pursuit. George never ventured out now, but Bess, thickly veiled, did all the marketing for the little household. She was a capital nurse too, and Josh, in his rough, uncouth way, was grateful. He had never known all his life what kindness was. Gertie he had looked upon as bound to do what he wanted, because he fed and kept her, and Gertie was only a child. But with Bess it was different. She and her husband had not only saved his life, they were going to be his chosen instruments in a deep-laid scheme of vengeance.

He had found out now the whole vile plot against him, and as he sat at home and coughed, he brooded over his wrongs. He had found out that he had been frightened out of the country by a ruse, and that Marston and Preene were at the bottom of it. Every time he coughed, every time he swayed to and fro, the great gorged veins on his head standing out in ridges with the violence of the paroxysms, he cursed Marston. He believed that he had caught his death that night in the cold waters of the Serpentine, and he grew almost to thirst for his destroyer’s blood.

If he had met Edward Marston face to face now he would have sprung upon him and throttled him where he stood. But the temptation did not come, and he sat and brooded over his wrongs, and matured the deep-laid scheme which was to put his enemy under his feet.

He rubbed his hands when he thought of the scene. He chuckled and laughed to himself as he pictured the hour of his triumph.

And day by day the cough grew worse and worse, and his brawny limbs lost more and more of their strength. Long sleepless nights and days of unrest were telling on him, and at times he would lean back in the easy-chair, which Bess had wheeled to the fire for him, close his eyes, and wonder what sort of a world it was men like himself went to when they died.

Bess and George knew only a portion of their protector’s secret. They knew that he, like themselves, had been foully wronged by Marston. George lost sight of everything in his desire to wipe the awful stain from his name, and to clear himself before the world. And Josh Heckett promised him if he would only be patient he should wring a confession of his innocence from the real culprit himself.

It was necessary for them to act with caution, for George’s recapture would have ruined all. Heckett would not risk all by striking till the blow was sure, and he had not the information he wanted yet, though some of his old associates were at work for him.

Birnie had promised to assist him in something that he particularly wanted to know, and one day the doctor’s carriage drove up to the door, and the doctor came in and told Josh two things—one he was glad to hear, and one he would not have heard for untold gold.

From the first piece of information he learnt that Marston was in his clutches now. The doctor had traced him to his den; the doctor had found out that he had inherited, through his wife, the Heritage estates, and that he had taken the name with the money.

But the doctor also told Heckett that his cough was worse, and that he must take every care of himself, for the symptoms were serious, and a fresh cold on this one would end in consumption.

And the doctor spoke only half the truth.

The wetting and exposure to cold that eventful night in Hyde Park had done their work, and a fatal disease had already seized the stalwart burglar in its grip.

The symptoms of galloping consumption had shown themselves to the experienced eye of Dr. Birnie.