’Mr. Van Torp is going to be accused of murder.  That man knows who did it.  Will you help me?’

It seemed an age before the answer to her whispered question came.

‘Yes.’

CHAPTER XIV

When Logotheti and his doctor had taken Mr. Feist away from the hotel, to the no small satisfaction of the management, they had left precise instructions for forwarding the young man’s letters and for informing his friends, if any appeared, as to his whereabouts.  But Logotheti had not given his own name.

Sir Jasper Threlfall had chosen for their patient a private establishment in Ealing, owned and managed by a friend of his, a place for the treatment of morphia mania, opium-eating, and alcoholism.

To all intents and purposes, as Logotheti had told Margaret, Charles Feist might as well have been in gaol.  Every one knows how indispensable it is that persons who consent to be cured of drinking or taking opium, or whom it is attempted to cure, should be absolutely isolated, if only to prevent weak and pitying friends from yielding to their heart-rending entreaties for the favourite drug and bringing them ‘just a little’; for their eloquence is often extraordinary, and their ingenuity in obtaining what they want is amazing.

So Mr. Feist was shut up in a pleasant room provided with double doors and two strongly barred windows that overlooked a pretty garden, beyond which there was a high brick wall half covered by a bright creeper, then just beginning to flower.  The walls, the doors, the ceiling, and the floor were sound-proof, and the garden could not in any way be reached without passing through the house.

As only male patients were received, the nurses and attendants were all men; for the treatment needed more firmness and sometimes strength than gentleness.  It was uncompromising, as English methods often are.  Except where life was actually in danger, there was no drink and no opium for anybody; when absolutely necessary the resident doctor gave the patient hypodermics or something which he called by an unpronounceable name, lest the sufferer should afterwards try to buy it; he smilingly described it as a new vegetable poison, and in fact it was nothing but dionine, a preparation of opium that differs but little from ordinary morphia.

Now Sir Jasper Threlfall was a very great doctor indeed, and his name commanded respect in London at large and inspired awe in the hospitals.  Even the profession admitted reluctantly that he did not kill more patients than he cured, which is something for one fashionable doctor to say of another; for the regular answer to any inquiry about a rival practitioner is a smile—­’a smile more dreadful than his own dreadful frown’—­an indescribable smile, a meaning smile, a smile that is a libel in itself.