“Yes?” said Mr. Bruff, with nine-tenths of his attention riveted on his papers, and with one-tenth unwillingly accorded to me.  “Anything else?”

“I must trouble you to return here with me, and to see me administer the dose.”

“Anything else?”

“One thing more.  I must put you to the inconvenience of remaining in Mr. Blake’s room, and of waiting to see what happens.”

“Oh, very good!” said Mr. Bruff.  “My room, or Mr. Blake’s room—­it doesn’t matter which; I can go on with my papers anywhere.  Unless you object, Mr. Jennings, to my importing that amount of common sense into the proceedings?”

Before I could answer, Mr. Blake addressed himself to the lawyer, speaking from his bed.

“Do you really mean to say that you don’t feel any interest in what we are going to do?” he asked.  “Mr. Bruff, you have no more imagination than a cow!”

“A cow is a very useful animal, Mr. Blake,” said the lawyer.  With that reply he followed me out of the room, still keeping his papers in his hand.

We found Miss Verinder, pale and agitated, restlessly pacing her sitting-room from end to end.  At a table in a corner stood Betteredge, on guard over the medicine-chest.  Mr. Bruff sat down on the first chair that he could find, and (emulating the usefulness of the cow) plunged back again into his papers on the spot.

Miss Verinder drew me aside, and reverted instantly to her one all-absorbing interest—­her interest in Mr. Blake.

“How is he now?” she asked.  “Is he nervous? is he out of temper?  Do you think it will succeed?  Are you sure it will do no harm?”

“Quite sure.  Come, and see me measure it out.”

“One moment!  It is past eleven now.  How long will it be before anything happens?”

“It is not easy to say.  An hour perhaps.”

“I suppose the room must be dark, as it was last year?”

“Certainly.”

“I shall wait in my bedroom—­just as I did before.  I shall keep the door a little way open.  It was a little way open last year.  I will watch the sitting-room door; and the moment it moves, I will blow out my light.  It all happened in that way, on my birthday night.  And it must all happen again in the same way, musn’t it?”

“Are you sure you can control yourself, Miss Verinder?”

“In his interests, I can do anything!” she answered fervently.

One look at her face told me that I could trust her.  I addressed myself again to Mr. Bruff.

“I must trouble you to put your papers aside for a moment,” I said.

“Oh, certainly!” He got up with a start—­as if I had disturbed him at a particularly interesting place—­and followed me to the medicine-chest.  There, deprived of the breathless excitement incidental to the practice of his profession, he looked at Betteredge—­and yawned wearily.

Miss Verinder joined me with a glass jug of cold water, which she had taken from a side-table.  “Let me pour out the water,” she whispered.  “I must have a hand in it!”