"I went through the regular routine, you know, and am as well able to see a patient safely through a cold or fever as I am to make him a set of teeth." Mr.Halliday burst into the room at this moment, singing a fragment of the "Chough and Crow" chorus, very much out of tune.

He was in boisterously high spirits, and very little the worse for liquor.

He had only walked from Covent Garden, he said, and had taken nothing but a tankard of stout and a Welsh rarebit.

He had been hearing the divinest singing--boys with the voices of angels--and had been taking his supper in a place which duchesses themselves did not disdain to peep at from the sacred recesses of a loge grillee, George Sheldon had told him.

But poor country-bred Georgina Halliday would not believe in the duchesses, or the angelic singing boys, or the primitive simplicity of Welsh rarebits.