Thoroughly, keenly, ebulliently alive he was. Thoroughly rich, also; and
if the truth be told, rather ebulliently conscious of his wealth. You
could see at a glance that he had paid no usurious interest to Fate on
his success; that his vigor and zest in life remained to him
undiminished. Vitality and a high satisfaction with his environment and
with himself as well placed in it, radiated from his bulky and handsome
person; but it was the vitality that impressed you first: impressed and
warmed you; perhaps warned you, too, on shrewder observation. A gleaming
personality, this. But behind the radiance one surmised fire. Occasion
given, Dr. Surtaine might well be formidable.

The world had been his oyster to open. He had cleaved it wide.
Ill-natured persons hinted, in reference to his business, that he had
used poison rather than the knife wherewith to loosen the stubborn
hinges of the bivalve. Money gives back small echo to the cries of
calumny, however. And Dr. Surtaine's Certina, that infallible and
guaranteed blood-cure, eradicator of all known human ills, "famous
across the map of the world," to use one of its advertising phrases,
under the catchword of "Professor Certain's Certina, the Sure-Cure" (for
he preserved the old name as a trade-mark), had made a vast deal of
money for its proprietor. Worthington estimated his fortune at fifteen
millions, growing at the rate of a million yearly, and was not
preposterously far afield. In a city of two hundred thousand
inhabitants, claimed (one hundred and seventy-five thousand allowed by a
niggling and suspicious census), this is all that the most needy of
millionaires needs. It was all that Dr. Surtaine needed. He enjoyed his
high satisfaction as a hard-earned increment.

Something more than satisfaction beamed from his face this blustery
March noon as he awaited the Worthington train at a small station an