N fifteen minutes the door of the consultation-room opened and the girl came out, but this time she looked neither to right nor to left as she walked rapidly and self-consciously to the entrance door. The doctor appeared immediately and invited Bellsmith to reënter, closing the door behind him with an air of finality.
"Now sit down," he commanded genially, "and smoke as much as you please. That clears me up for the day."
Bellsmith sat down, drew from his pocket a pair of long, rich cigars, obviously of a private brand, and offered one to the doctor.
"No, thank you," said the doctor, shaking his head; but he watched Bellsmith's movements with more intentness than he seemed to show, as Bellsmith neatly clipped his cigar with a silver cutter from his waistcoat pocket, slowly replaced the instrument, then, with equal deliberateness, took a wax match from a platinum case.
His slow, precise, slightly halting movements told the physician more than his actual physical examination had told. They gave him a very fair picture of Bellsmith's story, a picture that was well rounded out by the rich, exquisite cigars which the patient drew out so naturally. Prosperous as he was in his practice and much more prosperous as he would inevitably be, the doctor knew that he himself would never be a man who could make such a rite of his smoking,—would, indeed, never learn to smoke "vintage" cigars at all hours of the day with the unconscious casualness that was inborn in the man before him. A lifetime devoted to petty things, a whole existence centered on the most minute and delicate trifles of genteel living, that was the picture which was as clearly portrayed in the man's every move as if he had been painfully acting a studied character rôle.
The slow rites over the long cigar did, however, have one effect on the doctor. The sight of them probably proved too enticing even for his professional self-restraint, for impulsively reaching into a drawer of his desk, he took out a brier pipe, very black and much smoked down at one side. He rapped it out on his heel, and a moment later the fragrant blue smoke of Kentucky tobacco was mingling itself with the thinner gray smoke of Bellsmith's cigar. It was a wise move on the doctor's part, for with his first puff Bellsmith's guilty self-consciousness began to relax.
"Before we take up my own case, doctor," he began socially, "I suppose that it would be wholly unethical to ask you the name of that girl who was in here just now."
Put in words, the question did seem rather bald, and he added apologetically, "I had a vague feeling that I recognized her. Haven't I seen her somewhere?"
The doctor's lips twitched in a rather attractive Scotch smile around the stem of his pipe.
"You probably have," he replied.
An awkward silence followed and the doctor added, amused: "Really I don't suppose that there is any reason at all why I should not tell you. You 're likely to see her again any day, but, just the same, I presume I had better not."
It was hardly strange that his manner of putting it only increased Bellsmith's curiosity and he quite forgot himself.
"Is she a Leicester girl?" he pursued eagerly.
The doctor grinned, like an older man teasing a child.
"No, she is not," he replied. "I can tell you that much."
Bellsmith leaned back in his chair. He knew that he would get no more information, but his curiosity was still acute. He was certain now that he had seen the. girl somewhere.
"Did it ever occur to you, doctor," he suggested, "that people who meet in a physician's office always feel sort of chummy toward one another, like passengers on the same boat?"
"Yes," drawled the doctor, "I 've recognized that frequently. That's why I have to school myself not to talk."
The silence again was becoming awkward, and Bellsmith regretfully forced himself to remember that this was not merely a social smoke but a professional call. He was sorry to have to realize that fact for now, as the dusk began to fall and soften the brisk, offensively modern lines of the consultation-room, he began to feel more at ease than he had in months. Possibly that again was one of the very things that made Dr. MacVickar a huge success as a mental specialist.
Bellsmith tapped the ash from his cigar into a metal waste-basket.
"Well, doctor," he began, a little on the defensive, "I suppose that you are putting me down in your mind as merely one more ass who has so little else to worry about that he thinks he is sick."