"Nevertheless, Mr. Cortelyon, I am not dealing in romance--heaven forbid that I should in such a case!--but in sober fact. There is a homely proverb which affirms that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I have brought with me a small quantity of my remedy. Will you permit me to administer a dose of it to you?" Again there was a space of silence. The sick man's gaze was bent on the young doctor as if he would fain read him through and through, while his grizzled eyebrows made a straight line across his forehead, he liked the look of him; there was something in that strong, earnest, plain face which inspired confidence. Compared with him, Dr. Banks looked like an amiable old woman. "First of all, I should like to know what this so-called wonder-worker of yours is compounded of," he murmured, after a time. Dinkel shrugged his shoulders. "Its chief constituent is the dried and powdered bark of the tatao tree--a tree indigenous to the island of Java. The other ingredients consist of sundry drugs in certain fixed proportions, the secret of which I am not at present prepared to divulge." "Quite right--quite right. Very sensible on your part. You don't want to poison me, I suppose--hey?" The ghost of a smile flitted across Dinkel's rugged face. "What should I gain by that, sir? Only the hangman's noose. I think you ought to credit me with a desire for lengthening your days, not for shortening them." "It would puzzle you to make 'em much shorter than they seem likely to be," gasped the Squire, with a painful imitation of one of his old chuckles. "Well, well," he resumed, "I'll venture on a dose of this stuff of yours, not because I've any faith in it, mind you, but merely to take the cock-a-doodle out of you, and prove to you that you're not the wonderfully clever fellow you're inclined to crack yourself up as being." Not for days had the Squire spoken so much in so short a time, and as the last words died from off his lips his eyes closed and he sank into a half swoon. He could not have been in more competent hands, and before long he was brought back to consciousness. His first words, in a feeble whisper, were: "Give me the stuff; I'll take it." From his waistcoat pocket Dinkel extracted a tiny phial, no bigger than his little finger, about three-parts full of a ruby-colored fluid, which he proceeded to empty into a dessert spoon. "You won't find it at all disagreeable," he said, as he proffered the spoon and its contents to the Squire. "It tastes not unlike the liquorice-root I used to be fond of when a lad," murmured the latter half a minute later, and with that his eyes closed again. Dinkel held up his hand, and for a little space neither he nor his mother stirred. Then said the young doctor, "He is asleep, and if all goes well, as I have every reason to think it will, he won't awake for five or six hours. I will go now, and return between six and seven o'clock."