YOU robbed! You, Hemlock Jones, the Terror of Peculators!" I
gasped in amazement, arising and gripping the table as I faced him.

"Yes! Listen. I would confess it to no other. But YOU who have
followed my career, who know my methods; you, for whom I have
partly lifted the veil that conceals my plans from ordinary
humanity,--you, who have for years rapturously accepted my
confidences, passionately admired my inductions and inferences,
placed yourself at my beck and call, become my slave, groveled at
my feet, given up your practice except those few unremunerative and
rapidly decreasing patients to whom, in moments of abstraction over
MY problems, you have administered strychnine for quinine and
arsenic for Epsom salts; you, who have sacrificed anything and
everybody to me,--YOU I make my confidant!"

I arose and embraced him warmly, yet he was already so engrossed in
thought that at the same moment he mechanically placed his hand
upon his watch chain as if to consult the time. "Sit down," he
said. "Have a cigar?"

"I have given up cigar smoking," I said.

"Why?" he asked.

I hesitated, and perhaps colored. I had really given it up
because, with my diminished practice, it was too expensive. I
could afford only a pipe. "I prefer a pipe," I said laughingly.
"But tell me of this robbery. What have you lost?"

He arose, and planting himself before the fire with his hands under