“This began before McQuiggan.”

“Then you’ve been talking to some jealous doctor-crank.”

“For God’s sake, Father, answer my plain question.”

“Why, there’s no such thing as an actual cure for Bright’s disease.”

“Don’t you say in the advertisements that Certina will cure it?”

“Oh, advertisements!” returned the quack with an uneasy smile.  “Nobody takes an advertisement for gospel.”

“I’m answered.  Will it cure diabetes?”

“No medicine will.  No doctor can.  They’re incurable diseases.  Certina will do as much—­”

“Is it true that alcohol simply hastens the course of the disease?”

“Authorities differ,” said the quack warily.  “But as the disease is incurable—­”

“Then it’s all lies!  Lies and murder!”

“You’re excited, Boy-ee,” said the charlatan with haggard forbearance.  “Let me explain for a moment.”

“Isn’t it pretty late for explanations between you and me?”

“This is the gist of the proprietary trade,” said the Doctor, picking his words carefully.  “Most diseases cure themselves.  Medicine isn’t much good.  Doctors don’t know a great deal.  Now, if a patent medicine braces a patient up and gives him courage, it does all that can be done.  Then, the advertising inspires confidence in the cure and that’s half the battle.  There’s a lot in Christian Science, and a lot in common between Christian Science and the proprietary business.  Both work on the mind and help it to cure the body.  But the proprietary trade throws in a few drugs to brace up the system, allay symptoms, and push along the good work.  There you have Certina.”

Hal shook his head in dogged misery.  “It can’t cure.  You admit it can’t cure.  And it may kill, in the very cases where it promises to cure.  How could you take money made that way?”

A flash of cynicism hardened the handsome old face.  “Somebody’s going to make a living off the great American sucker.  If it wasn’t us, it’d be somebody else.”  He paused, sighed, and in a phrase summed up and crystallized the whole philosophy of the medical quack:  “Life’s a cut-throat game, anyway.”

“And we’re living on the blood,” said Hal.  “It’s a good thing,” he added slowly, “that I didn’t know you as you are before Milly Neal’s death.”

“Why so?”

“Because,” cried the son fiercely, “I’d have published the whole truth of how she died and why, in the ‘Clarion.’”

“It isn’t too late yet,” retorted Dr. Surtaine with pained dignity, “if you wish to strike at the father who hasn’t been such a bad father to you.  But would you have told the truth of your part in it?”

“My part in it?” repeated Hal, in dull puzzlement.  “You mean the ad?”

“You know well enough what I mean.  Boy-ee, Boy-ee,”—­there was an edge of genuine agony in the sonorous voice,—­“we’ve drawn far apart, you and I. Is all the wrong on my side?  Can you judge me so harshly, with your own conscience to answer?”