Further revelations were cut short by the entrance of the doctor himself.  A doctor with sleep-cleared eyes, fresh collar, and newly brushed hair.  A doctor who shook hands with his caller in a manner which even the professional Bubble felt to be irreproachable.

“Bubble, you may go.”

With a grin of satisfied pride the junior partner departed, but once outside the gloomy expression returned.

“It’s only choir-tickets!” he told Ann, who was waiting around the corner of the house.  “Come on—­let’s go fishin’.”

Inside the office Esther and the doctor looked at each other and smiled.  He, because he felt like smiling; she, because she felt nervous.  Yet it was not going to be as awkward as she had feared.  With a decided sense of relief she realised that Dr. Callandar looked exactly like a doctor after all!  Convention, even in clothes, has a calming effect.  There was little of the weary tramp who had quenched his throat at the school pump in the well groomed and quietly capable looking doctor.  With a notable decrease of tension Esther saw that the man before her was a stranger, a pleasant, professional stranger, with whom no embarrassment was possible.

As for him he realised nothing except that Coombe was really a delightful place.  He felt glad that he had stayed.

“No one ill, I hope, Miss Coombe?” His tone, even, seemed to have lost the whimsical inflection of the tramp.

“No, Doctor.  Not ill exactly.  It is Aunt Amy.  We cannot understand just what is the matter.  You see, Aunty imagines things.  She is not quite like other people.  Perhaps,” with a quick smile as she thought of Mrs. Sykes, “perhaps you may have heard of her—­of her fantastic ideas?  They are really quite harmless and apart from them she is the most sensible person I know.  But lately, just the other day, something happened—­”

He checked her with an almost imperceptible gesture.  “Could you tell me about it from the beginning?”

Esther looked troubled.  “I do not know much about the beginning.  You see, Aunt Amy is my step-mother’s aunt, and I have only known her since she came to live with us shortly after my father’s second marriage.  But I know that she has been subject to delusions since she was a young girl.  She was to have been married and on the wedding day her lover became ill with scarlet fever, a most malignant type.  She also sickened with it a little later; it killed him and left her mentally twisted—­as she is now.  Her health is good and the—­strangeness—­is not very noticeable.  It has usually to do with unimportant things.  She is really,” with a little burst of enthusiasm, “a Perfect Dear!”

The doctor smiled.  “And the new development?”