Having made his preparations and washed his hands, he returned, syringed the wound with some antiseptic stuff, and dressed and bandaged the leg up to the knee.  After this he gave Anscombe hot milk to drink, with two eggs broken into it, and told him to rest a while as he must not eat anything solid at present.  Then he threw a blanket over him, and, signing to me to come away, let down a mat over the window.

“I put a little something into that milk,” he said outside, “which will send him to sleep for a few hours.  So we will leave him quiet.  Now you’ll want a wash.”

“Where are you going to take Mr. Quatermain?” asked Marnham who was seated on the stoep.

“Into my room,” he answered.

“Why?  There’s Heda’s ready.”

“Heda might return at any moment,” replied the doctor.  “Also Mr. Quatermain had better sleep in Mr. Anscombe’s room.  He will very likely want some one to look after him at night.”

Marnham opened his mouth to speak again, then changed his mind and was silent, as a servant is silent under rebuke.  The incident was quite trifling, yet it revealed to me the relative attitude of these two men.  Without a doubt Rodd was the master of his partner, who did not even care to dispute with him about the matter of the use of his daughter’s bedroom.  They were a queer couple who, had it not been for my anxiety as to Anscombe’s illness, would have interested me very much, as indeed they were destined to do.

Well, I went to tidy up in the doctor’s room, and as he left me alone while I washed, had the opportunity of studying it a little.  Like the rest of the house it was lined with native wood which was made to serve as the backs of bookshelves and of cupboards filled with medicines and instruments.  The books formed a queer collection.  There were medical works, philosophical works, histories, novels, most of them French, and other volumes of a sort that I imagine are generally kept under lock and key; also some that had to do with occult matters.  There was even a Bible.  I opened it thoughtlessly, half in idle curiosity, to see whether it was ever used, only to replace it in haste.  For at the very page that my eye fell on, I remember it was one of my favourite chapters in Isaiah, was a stamp in violet ink marked H. M.’s Prison—­well, I won’t say where.

I may state, however, that the clue enabled me in after years to learn an episode in this man’s life which had brought about his ruin.  There is no need to repeat it or to say more than that gambling and an evil use of his medical knowledge to provide the money to pay his debts, were the cause of his fall.  The strange thing is that he should have kept the book which had probably been given to him by the prison chaplain.  Still everybody makes mistakes sometimes.  Or it may have had associations for him, and of course he had never seen this stamp upon an unread page, which happened to leap to my eye.