"What you have never had!"

The strange man suddenly caught Arthur's hand again, suddenly
looked once more hard in his face.

"Yes," he said, with a repetition of the bitter laugh. "You have
brought a poor devil back into the world who has no business
there. Do I astonish you? Well, I have a fancy of my own for
telling you what men in my situation generally keep a secret. I
have no name and no father. The merciful law of society tells me
I am nobody's son! Ask your father if he will be my father too,
and help me on in life with the family name."

Arthur looked at me more puzzled than ever.

I signed to him to say nothing, and then laid my fingers again on
the man's wrist. No. In spite of the extraordinary speech that he
had just made, he was not, as I had been disposed to suspect,
beginning to get light-headed. His pulse, by this time, had
fallen back to a quiet, slow beat, and his skin was moist and
cool. Not a symptom of fever or agitation about him.

Finding that neither of us answered him, he turned to me, and
began talking of the extraordinary nature of his case, and asking
my advice about the future course of medical treatment to which
he ought to subject himself. I said the matter required careful
thinking over, and suggested that I should send him a
prescription a little later. He told me to write it at once, as
he would most likely be leaving Doncaster in the morning before I
was up. It was quite useless to represent to him the folly and