Dr. Paull's Theory: A Romance

								

certain of the hospital books and cases of instruments were kept. The
watch was a hunter. It struck him that the glass might be broken. It
was. He shook out the fragments; then, seeing a locket attached to the
chain, he opened that.
The glass of this was intact, and covered the coloured photograph of a
woman’s face—sweet, bright, fair, with smiling lips and dark eyes, that
even on lifeless paper looked mischief and pretty defiance.
He shut up the locket in a hurry—he had not meant prying—and placing the
contents of Sir Roderick’s pockets in a corner of the safe, turned the
key upon them.
“This is my quiet day’s work,” he thought, with a sigh. It was useless
to sit down to a scientific treatise, for which the most complete
abstraction was an absolute necessity, when at any moment he might be
summoned to this unexpected and important case; so he put the scattered
sheets of manuscript together, and re-arranged the books of reference
that he had piled on chairs by his writing-table in their rightful
places on the book-shelves. Then he sat down in his American chair, and
stared at the fire.
“A strange old face,” he was thinking, “massive, thoughtful. Quite a
Rembrandt head. I wonder how old he is—whether he will get over it?
Nasty shock, anyhow. Must have fallen on a soft bit of road; if it had
been the kerb, or cobbles even, it might have been all over with him.”
It seemed to Paull that he must have seen that face before. Yet this
could scarcely be. He had come to the hospital from his country home. He
was the only son of the Rector of Kilby, in Derbyshire, and had seldom
gone out, except to the museums and to scientific lectures; his ambition
kept him chained to its object—his profession.
“The sort of face one sometimes dreams of,” he concluded. “I thought I
was past nonsense of this sort. This latest thing in accidents has upset
me as if I were a girl.”
Presently, the “gentleman’s housekeeper” was announced, and a portly
dame, handsomely dressed in dark silk and a fur-trimmed cloak, entered.
At once Hugh banished all idea of the locket and Mrs. Naylor having the
faintest connecting link.
Sir Roderick’s housekeeper was comely, and good-looking in her buxom
way. But although there was anxiety in her enquiries, and evident relief
in her manner when Paull gave her hopes that her employer might recover,
the ruddiness did not forsake her cheeks, nor was she in the least
flurried.
“I feared something might happen, that I did,” she said, accepting a
chair. “The groom, David, he didn’t half like going behind that mare.
Sir Roderick’s a first-rate driver; they do say at both riding and
driving he can manage anything in the way of a horse. But there, I’ve
seen that Kitty in the stable, and I know she’s that bad-tempered—but,
lor! no one daren’t say one word to Sir Roderick.”
Paull asked if there were no near relations who might be sent for, or