cheap, black bag--what do you think they would say to that, my lord?"

Cyril felt cold chills creeping down his back and the palms of his hands grew moist. Not a flicker of an eyelash, however, betrayed his inward tumult. "They would no doubt pay as high a tribute to your imagination as I do," he answered. Then, abandoning his careless pose, he sat up in his chair.

"You have been insulting me for the last half-hour, and I have borne it very patiently, partly because your absurd suspicions amused me, and partly because I realised that, although you are a fool, you are an honest fool."

"Sir!" The doctor turned purple in the face.

"You can hardly resent being called a fool by a man you have been accusing of murder and wife-beating. But I don't want you to go to the police with this cock-and-bull story----"

"Ah! I thought not," sneered the doctor.

"Because," continued Cyril, ignoring the interruption, "I want to protect my wife from unpleasant notoriety, and also, although you don't deserve it, to keep you from becoming a public laughing stock. So far you have done all the talking; now you are to listen to me. Sit down. You make me nervous strutting about like that. Sit down, I tell you. There, that's better. Now let us see what all this rigmarole really amounts to. You began by asking for my wife's address, and when I did not immediately gratify what I considered your impertinent curiosity, you launch forth into vague threats of exposure. As far as I can make out from your disjointed harangue, your excuse for prying into my affairs is that by doing so you are protecting a helpless woman from further ill-treatment. Very well. Granting that you really suppose me to be a brute, your behaviour might be perfectly justified if--if you believed that your patient is my wife. But you tell me that you do not. You think that she is either my mistress or my accomplice, or both. Now, if she is a criminal and an immoral woman, you must admit that she has shown extraordinary cleverness, inasmuch as she succeeded not only in eluding the police but in deceiving you. For the impression she made on you was a very favourable one, was it not? She seemed to you unusually innocent as well as absolutely frank, didn't she?"

"Yes," acknowledged the doctor.

"Now, if she was able to dupe so trained an observer as yourself, she must be a remarkable woman, and cannot be the helpless creature you picture her, and consequently would be in no 

 Prev. P 82/173 next