'I shall be much pleased. But do you not wish to be by yourselves?'

'She met me at the station yesterday, and we dined together. We talked
steadily from half past six till midnight.'

'Or, rather, she talked and you listened with the delighted attention of
a happy lover.'

Arthur Burdon had just arrived in Paris. He was a surgeon on the staff of
St Luke's, and had come ostensibly to study the methods of the French
operators; but his real object was certainly to see Margaret Dauncey. He
was furnished with introductions from London surgeons of repute, and had
already spent a morning at the Hôtel Dieu, where the operator, warned
that his visitor was a bold and skilful surgeon, whose reputation in
England was already considerable, had sought to dazzle him by feats that
savoured almost of legerdemain. Though the hint of charlatanry in the
Frenchman's methods had not escaped Arthur Burdon's shrewd eyes, the
audacious sureness of his hand had excited his enthusiasm. During
luncheon he talked of nothing else, and Dr Porhoët, drawing upon his
memory, recounted the more extraordinary operations that he had witnessed
in Egypt.

He had known Arthur Burdon ever since he was born, and indeed had missed
being present at his birth only because the Khedive Ismaïl had summoned
him unexpectedly to Cairo. But the Levantine merchant who was Arthur's
father had been his most intimate friend, and it was with singular
pleasure that Dr Porhoët saw the young man, on his advice, enter his
own profession and achieve a distinction which himself had never won.

Though too much interested in the characters of the persons whom chance