"I don't fancy he does. You see, that advice was conveyed by word of
mouth. The girls dared not trust themselves to correspondence, otherwise
they might have approached you in a more prosaic manner. But I confess
you startled me to-night."

"What do you mean by that?"

"When you sent me that note. What you virtually asked me to do was to
countenance murder. When I went into the sick room I saw that Christiana
Henson was dying. The first idea that flashed across my mind was that
Reginald Henson was getting the girl out of the way for his own purposes.
My dear fellow, the whole atmosphere literally spoke of albumen. Walker
must have been blind not to see how he was being deceived. I was about to
give him my opinion pretty plainly when your note came up to me. And
there was Enid, with her whole soul in her large eyes, pleading for my
silence. If the girl died I was accessory after and before the fact. You
will admit that that was a pretty tight place to put a doctor in."

"That's because you didn't know the facts of the case, my dear Bell."

"Then perhaps you'll be so good as to enlighten me," Bell said, drily.

"Certainly. That was part of my scheme. In that synopsis of the story
obtained by the girls by some more or less mechanical means, the reputed
death of a patient forms the crux of the tale. The idea occurred to me
after reading a charge against a medical student some time ago in the
_Standard_. The man wanted to get himself out of the way; he wanted to
be considered as dead, in fact. By the artful use of albumen in certain
doses he produced symptoms of disease which will be quite familiar to
you. He made himself so ill that his doctor naturally concluded that he