The Argosy — page 273: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Edina. 257 destined to get a shock himself. One evening, when he had been called to a case of emergency near home, upon quitting the sick man’s house, he entered a chemist’s for the purpose of directing some article, which it was not in the province of a medical man to supply, to be sent to the sufferer. Dashing into the shop hurriedly, for his time was . not his own, he was beginning to give his order. ** Will you send —— ” And there his speech failed him. He stopped as suddenly and completely as though he had been shot. The young man to whom he ‘was addressing himself, with the attentive red-brown eyes in which gleamed a smile of intelligence, and the clean white apron tied round his waist, was Blase Pellet. They looked at one another in the full glare of the gas-light. Blase was the first to speak. ‘ How do you do, Mr. Raynor?” “Ts it you?” cried Frank, recovering himself somewhat. “Are you living here ?” “Since a week past,” replied Blase. “Why have you left Trennach ?” “7% came up to better myself,” said Blase demurely. “One hears. great things of fortunes being made in London.” “ And of being lost, Pellet,” rejoined Frank. “T can go back at any time,” observed Blase. ‘ Old Float would be only too gladto have me. The young fellow he has now in my place is not me, Float writes me word. Float will have to attend to business a little more himself now, and I expect it will not suit him.” Without any answer to this, Frank gave the order he had gone in to- give, and passed out of the shop, his mind in a very disagreeable ferment. “ He has come up here as a spy upon me; he is watching my move-. ments,” said Frank to himself. “ How did he know I was here—in this. part of London?” A positive conviction that it was utterly useless to try to evade Blase Pellet, had taken sudden possession of him ; that he had. been tracking him all along by the means of spies and emissaries, and had now come to do it in person. He felt that if he were to sail away over the seas and set up his tent in an African desert, or on the arid shores of some remote fastness of the Indian Empire, or amid the unexplored wilds of a barren prairie, he should see Blase Pellet in another tent, side by side with him, the next moming. For the passing moment, his several pressing engagements had gone out of his head. His patients, lying in expectation of him, might lie: self was all in all. The uneasiness that had taken hold of him amounted to tribulation. “I wonder what Dame Bell knows of this?” it suddenly occurred to him to think. And no sooner did it occur than, acting on the * moment’s impulse, he determined to ask her, and walked towards her lodgings at his usual quick rate. She had taken rooms a a quiet VOL, XXIL _ comicbooks.cout