It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant at
Sir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master's
room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "Dolores
Barton."
"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily.
The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was
close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients
from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on
their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead.
His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their
husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers
and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a
hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alo
