"You won't be offended?
No--you couldn't be offended!" It was half-jocular, half-anxious, wholly inexplicable.
"At what," asked Hugh Finlay, "should I be offended ?" Again, with a deep sigh, the Doctor dropped into his chair.

"I see I must begin at the beginning," he said.

But Finlay, with sudden intuition, had risen and stood before him trembling, with a hand against the mantelpiece.
"No," he said, "if you have anything to tell me of importance, for God's sake begin at the end." Some vibration in his voice went straight to the heart of the Doctor, banishing as it travelled, every irrelevant thing that it encountered.
"Then the end is this, Finlay," he said.

"The young woman, Miss Christie Cameron, whom you were so wilfully bound and determined to marry, has thrown you over--that is, if you will give her back her word--has jilted you--that is, if you'll let her away.

Has thought entirely better of the matter." ("He stared out of his great sockets of eyes as if the sky had fallen," Dr Drummond would say, recounting it.) "For--for what reason ?" asked Finlay, hardly yet able to distinguish between the sound of disaster and the sense that lay beneath.
"May I begin at the beginning ?" asked the Doctor, and Hugh silently nodded.
("He sat there and never took his eyes off me, twisting his fingers.