Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner.  He took no fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very special reason.  He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could not afford the price of a week’s comforts merely to be told to travel.  And it was these he desired to help:  cases often requiring special and patient study—­things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one would dream of expecting him to give.

But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the “Psychic Doctor.”

In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual.  What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—­for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—­but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments.

For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the “man who knows.”  There was a trace of pity in his voice—­contempt he never showed—­when he spoke of their methods.

“This classification of results is uninspired work at best,” he said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.  “It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere.  It is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy.  Far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily slip into place and explain themselves.  For the sources are accessible, and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes practical investigation safe and possible.”

And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than a keen power of visualising.

“It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,” he would say.  “The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction.  And you will find this always to be the real test.”