"Good gracious! You surprise me!" cried the doctor. "He always seemed to
me such a clever young fellow. Indeed, you said so to me yourself."

"So he is. Very clever," said Mr. Wedmore, shortly. "I don't suppose
there are many young chaps of his age--for he's barely thirty--at the
Bar whose prospects are as good as his. But, for all that, I have a
strong suspicion that he's got a tile loose, and that's why I wanted to
speak to you. Now his father was in a lunatic asylum no less than three
times, and was in one when he died."

The doctor looked grave.

"That's a bad history, certainly. Do you know how the father's malady
started?"

"Why, yes. It was the effect of a wound in the head received when he was
a young man out in America, in the war with Mexico in '46."

"That isn't the sort of mania that is likely to come down from father to
son," said the doctor, "if his brain was perfectly sound before, and the
recurrent mania the result of an accident."

"Well, so I've understood. And the matter has never troubled me at all
until lately, when I have begun to detect certain morbid tendencies in
Dudley, and a general change which makes me hesitate to trust him with
the happiness of my daughter."

"Can you give me instances?" asked the doctor, although he began to feel
sure that whatever opinion he might express on the matter, Mr. Wedmore
would pay little attention to any but his own.