Book 2 Chapter 6

It did not take Anstice long to discover that the accusation against him--an accusation all the more difficult to refute because of the half-truth on which it was based--had been disseminated throughout Littlefield with a thoroughness which implied a determination on the part of the anonymous writer to leave no prominent resident in the neighbourhood in ignorance of Anstice's supposed cowardice on that bygone day in India.

He could not help noticing as he went here and there on his daily business that some of his patients looked askance at him, although they did their best to hide their new and rather disconcerting interest in him. So far as he knew, none of his patients forsook him for another and less notorious doctor, but he was keenly alive to the altered manner of some of those whom he attended, and although at present it was evident that he was not yet condemned--after all, no fair-minded person condemns another solely on the evidence of a tale-bearer who is ashamed to put his name to the stories he relates--yet Anstice felt with a quick galling of his pride that he was on probation, as it were, that those with whom he came in contact were considering what verdict they should pass upon him. And although his indifference to that verdict equalled Mrs. Carstairs' former indifference to the opinion of these same neighbours, his soul was seared with the thought that his unhappy story--or rather a garbled version of it--was common property among those men and women whom he had served faithfully to the best of his ability during the eighteen months he had spent in Littlefield.