“Doctor Undershaw, Muster Melrose.”

Melrose stood to arms.

A young man entered, his step quick and decided.  He was squarely built, with spectacled gray eyes, and a slight brown moustache on an otherwise smooth face.  He looked what he was—­competent, sincere, and unafraid.

Melrose did not move from his position as the doctor approached, and barely acknowledged his bow.  Behind the sarcasm of his voice the inner fury could be felt.

“I presume, sir, you have come to offer me your apologies?”

Undershaw looked up.

“I am very sorry, Mr. Melrose, to have inconvenienced you and your household.  But really after such an accident there was nothing else to be done.  I am certain you would have done the same yourself.  When I first saw him, the poor fellow was in a dreadful state.  The only thing to do was to carry him into the nearest shelter and look after him.  It was—­I assure you—­a case of life and death.”

Melrose made an effort to control himself, but the situation was too much for him.

He burst out, storming: 

“I wonder, sir, that you have the audacity to present yourself to me at all.  Who or what authorized you, I should like to know, to take possession of my house, and install this young man here?  What have I to do with him?  He has no claim on me—­not the hundredth part of a farthing!  My servant tells me he offered to help you carry him to the farm, which is only a quarter of a mile distant.  That of course would have been the reasonable, the gentlemanly thing to do, but just in order to insult me, to break into the privacy of a man who, you know, has always endeavoured to protect himself and his life from vulgar tongues and eyes, you must needs browbeat my servants, and break open my house.  I tell you, sir, this is a matter for the lawyers!  It shan’t end here.  I’ve sent for an ambulance, and I’ll thank you to make arrangements at once to remove this young man to some neighbouring hospital, where, I understand, he will have every attention.”

Melrose, even at seventy, was over six feet, and as he stood towering above the little doctor, his fine gray hair flowing back from strong aquiline features, inflamed with a passion of wrath, he made a sufficiently magnificent appearance.  Undershaw grew a little pale, but he fronted his accuser quietly.

“If you wish him removed, Mr. Melrose, you must take the responsibility yourself, I shall have nothing to do with it—­nor will the nurses.”

“What do you mean, sir?  You get yourself and me into this d——­d hobble, and then you refuse to take the only decent way out of it!  I request you—­I command you—­as soon as the Whitebeck ambulance comes, to remove your patient at once, and the two women who are looking after him.”

Undershaw slipped his hands into his pockets.  The coolness of the gesture was not lost on Melrose.

“I regret that for a few days to come I cannot sanction anything of the kind.  My business, Mr. Melrose, as a doctor, is not to kill people, but, if I can, to cure them.”