And he flung back his head and laughed heartily at his own joke, while Master Nathaniel glared at him, speechless with rage. "Now, your Worship," he went on in a more serious voice. "If I have been indiscreet you must forgive me ... as I forgave you in the parlour. You see, a doctor is obliged to keep his eyes open ... it is not from what his patients tell him that he prescribes for them, but from what he notices himself. To a doctor everything is a symptom ... the way a man lights his pipe even. For instance, I once had the honour of having your Worship as my partner at a game of cards. You've forgotten probably--it was years ago at the Pyepowders. We lost that game. Why? Because each time that you held the most valuable card in the pack--the Lyre of Bones--you discarded it as if it had burnt your fingers. Things like that set a doctor wondering, Master Nathaniel. You are a man who is frightened about something." Master Nathaniel slowly turned crimson. Now that the doctor mentioned it, he remembered quite well that at one time he objected to holding the Lyre of Bones. Its name caused him to connect it with the Note. As we have seen, he was apt to regard innocent things as taboo. But to think that somebody should have noticed it! "This is a necessary preface to what I have got to say with regard to your son," went on Endymion Leer. "You see, I want to make it clear that, though one has never come within a mile of fairy fruit, one can have all the symptoms of being an habitual consumer of it. Wait! Wait! Hear me out!" For Master Nathaniel, with a smothered exclamation, had sprung from his chair. "I am not saying that you have all these symptoms ... far from it. But you know that there are spurious imitations of many diseases of the body--conditions that imitate exactly all the symptoms of the disease, and the doctors themselves are often taken in by them. You wish me to confine my remarks to your son ... well, I consider that he is suffering from a spurious surfeit of fairy fruit." Though still angry, Master Nathaniel was feeling wonderfully relieved. This explanation of his own condition that robbed it of all mystery and, somehow, made it rational, seemed almost as good as a cure. So he let the doctor go on with his disquisition without any further interruption except the purely rhetorical ones of an occasional protesting grunt. "Now, I have studied somewhat closely the effects of fairy fruit," the doctor was saying. "These effects we regard as a malady. But, in reality, they are more like a melody--a tune that one can't get out of one's head," and he shot a very sly little look at Master Nathaniel, out of his bright bird-like eyes.