The Minister's Crime.
By Maclaren Cobban.
I.
HERE is really little use in my continuing to call," said the doctor; "it will only be running you into useless expense. I may go on prescribing and prescribing till I get through the whole pharmacopœia, but I can do him no good; what he needs is not drugs but air—a bracing air. Get him away out of this, and let him run wild in the country, or—if your engagements won't let you get to the country—remove to some open suburb north or south."
The doctor's visit.
The doctor sat in a little parlour, in a shabby-genteel street of close-packed middle London. Opposite him was the patient, a child of three or four, on his mother's knee and clasped about with his mother's arms, while his father, the Rev. James Murray, stood anxiously listening. The boy—the first-born, and the only child of his parents—had a month or two before been stricken down with an infant's ailment, and though that had passed, he continued so weak that the doctor had tested the soundness of heart and lungs, and the outcome of his examination was that the only hope for the child was change of air.
"I only wish," said the father, "that I could take him away. I must try, though I don't see at present how I am to do it."
He turned away to the window to hide the emotion that would rise to choke him when he met the large, weary blue eyes of his boy bent on him, as if in appeal that he might not be allowed to fade and wither and die, like a flower before it has fairly bloomed.
"Can't you at least send the boy away with his mother?" asked the doctor.
"I must try," said the father without turning round. "I must see what can be done."
"In the meantime," said the doctor,
