‘Only eighteen, unless some more has come in this morning,’ answered the doctor.

’And your liberty, Sir, that on the spot, if you undertake the operation, and the fee so soon as you have done it.’

The doctor’s face blazed with a grin of exultation; he squared his shoulders and shook himself a little; and after a little silence, he demanded—­

‘Can you describe the case, Sir, as you stated it to Sir Hugh Skelton?’

’Surely, Sir, but I rely for it and the terms, upon the description of a village doctor, named Toole; an ignoramus, I fear.’

And with this preface he concisely repeated the technical description which he had compiled from various club conversations of Dr. Toole’s, to which no person imagined he had been listening so closely.

’If that’s the case, Sir, ‘twill kill him.’

’Kill or cure, Sir, ‘tis the only chance,’ rejoined Dangerfield.

‘What sort is the wife, Sir?’ asked Black Dillon, with a very odd look, while his eye still rested on the short note that poor Mrs. Sturk had penned.

‘A nervous little woman of some two or three and forty,’ answered the spectacles.

The queer look subsided.  He put the note in his pocket, and looked puzzled, and then he asked—­’

‘Is he any way related to you, Sir?’

’None in life, Sir.  But that does not affect, I take it, the medical question.’

‘No, it does not affect the medical question—­nothing can,’ observed the surgeon, in a sulky, sardonic way.

‘Of course not,’ answered the oracle of the silver spectacles, and both remained silent for a while.

’You want to have him speak?  Well, suppose there’s a hundred chances to one the trepan kills him on the spot—­what then?’ demanded the surgeon, uncomfortably.

Dangerfield pondered, also uncomfortably for a minute, but answered nothing; on the contrary, he demanded—­

‘And what then, Sir?’

‘But here, in this case,’ said Black Dillon, ’there’s no chance at all, do you see, there’s no chance, good, bad, or indifferent; none at all.’

‘But I believe there is,’ replied Dangerfield, decisively.

‘You believe, but I know.’

‘See, Sir,’ said Dangerfield, darkening, and speaking with a strange snarl; ’I know what I’m about.  I’ve a desire, Sir, that he should speak, if ’twere only two minutes of conscious articulate life, and then death—­’tis not a pin’s point to me how soon.  Left to himself he must die; therefore, to shrink from the operation on which depends the discovery both of his actual murderer and of his money, Sir, otherwise lost to his family, is—­is a damned affectation! I think it—­so do you, Sir; and I offer five hundred guineas as your fee, and Mrs. Sturk’s letter to bear you harmless.’

Then there was a pause.  Dangerfield knew the man’s character as well as his skill.  There were things said about him darker than we have hinted at.