It was during the second week of Leni’s last fortnight that the party was to take place. All day the sun had shone so warmly that one of Shawgate’s pavements had been deserted and the other crowded with shade-seeking shoppers. Jessica, always insistent on getting precisely what she wanted and at the most economical price, was among them; the tradesmen respected her for the qualities that made her visits a trial. Besides, they knew the doctor’s party was to be in the evening and that somebody would say, “Do tell me, Mrs. Newcome, where you got these delicious preserves?”

While she was shopping, Sam Bates, the electrician, was running a few colored lights under the cedar tree in the doctor’s garden, and Johnny Johnson, the odd-job gardener, was erecting trestle tables, arranging chairs on the lawn, and generally making himself useful. The doctor was visiting; Susan was baking pies for the evening; Leni was doing simply nothing.

By special arrangement there was to be no surgery session, and David, as soon as he got home, took a tepid bath and changed into a different suit of clothes that looked exactly the same. The invitations were for eight o’clock, by which time the heat of the day had drained into walls and pavements, leaving the air cool. The sky was clear, and a half-moon rose over the cedar tree.

About fifty people gathered and grouped in the drawing-room and garden — the Dean and the Archdeacon, the Precentor, Jaggers the organist, Yule the choirmaster, various vicars of parishes, doctors, a solicitor, a retired admiral, the headmaster of the local grammar school, the editor of the Calderbury Gazette. But there the edge was reached of that social territory beyond which Mrs. Newcome would not venture; and it was tacitly understood that Fred Garton, son of the town’s leading grocer and invited because of his fine baritone, was not really a guest in the same sense as the others.

Greetings, gossip, a piano solo by the choirmaster, who did not play very well, and for whom the doctor’s piano would not have been good enough if he had; then a Grieg violin solo by the wife of the grammar-school head. In the midst of this, Susan entered with a message which made David tiptoe from the room, followed by glances of vague commiseration. “It’s always like that for a doctor, isn’t it?” people said to Jessica afterwards, and she admitted that it was. Actually she didn’t feel that David’s absence mattered very much, since he was no help in running any but a children’s party.

He cycled to a cottage in Colohan Street, off Briargate; a workman, his wife, and six children lived there in four small rooms. One of the six lay gasping and coughing in bed. “Bronchial, doctor,” the father kept saying, with the pathetic trustfulness of the man who knows a word. David soon found that it was double pneumonia. There was little chance for the boy, who was about the same age as Gerald; it was a case that should have been under skilled treatment days before. David did what he could, left instructions with the plaintively glum parents, and promised to send a nurse immediately and call again about midnight. Said the man timorously: “Will a nurse cost much, doctor?” — and David answered, as on so many other occasions, “Oh no, no, very little — I’ll arrange it.” Downstairs, as the woman edged him along the narrow lobby past a perambulator, she said: “You know, we used to have Dr. Thompson, but Mrs. Nickle who’s just come to live next door put in a word for you.” “God bless my soul,” thought David momentarily, “she thinks she’s doing me a favor calling me in to attend a neglected pneumonia that I’ll never get paid for and that I’ll probably be blamed for not being able to save!” But he said, touched by sympathy that lay deeper: “Yes, indeed, I remember Mrs. Nickle …”