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It did not take Anstice long to discover that the accusation against him--an accusation all the more difficult to refute because of the half-truth on which it was based--had been dissehness which implied a determination on the part of the anonyhbourhood in ignorance of Anstice's supposed cowardice on that bygone day in India

He could not help noticing as he went here and there on his daily business that soh they did their best to hide their new and rather disconcerting interest in him So far as he knew, none of his patients forsook him for another and less notorious doctor, but he was keenly alive to the altered h at present it was evident that he was not yet condemned--after all, no fair-minded person condemns another solely on the evidence of a tale-bearer who is ashamed to put his naalling of his pride that he was on probation, as it were, that those ho what verdict they should pass upon hih his indifference to that verdict equalled Mrs Carstairs' forhbours, his soul was seared with the thought that his unhappy story--or rather a garbled version of it--was co those men and women who the eighteenhe was fully determined So soon as this mystery should be solved--and he fancied a solution was no longer in the position which had become tedious, unbearably tedious in its craland or abroad, where he ht have leisure to pursue those studies in research which had been so ruthlessly cut short by his own er cared for faer danced before his eyes with alluring pronition, the youthful, vital part of him was dead, slain by the same bullet which had ended poor Hilda Ryder's happy life; and although he was beginning to look forward to a new and less cramped career than this which now shackled him, the joyous, opti

It was impossible that once at work the old interest in his subject ht awake; but noould work for the work's sake only, for the sake of the distraction it h all his troubles he had preserved, at bottom, the quick humanity which had led hi less now of his old areatest ills of mankind than of the zest which the renewed study of the subject ht restore to his own overshadowed life