"Look at him!" the patient cried, rising slightly in her chair. "Here, you! Stop doing that, for heaven's sake! You look like an ailing duck!" "That's nothing to what I'd look like if I stood up," Marc panted in one last sprint for the screen. "That would be worse." * * * * * It was not until this point in the proceedings that Toffee began to realize what had happened. Listening to the voices in the hall, it had struck her that one of them had a dreadfully familiar ring to it. It was much to her dismay that, in peering around the edge of the screen, she suddenly found herself practically eyeball to eyeball with Marc. She let out a small, strangled cry. "Oh, my gosh!" she said. "For Pete's sake, let me in there!" Marc said. "But how did you get out there?" "How should I know? Never mind that, let me in. They're all _looking_!" "At what?" "I shudder to think. Please let me in!" "But why are you all doubled up like that?" Tired of words, Marc reached up to the screen to pull it away so he could get behind it. Unfortunately, it was at this same instant that Toffee decided to shove it open to make room. With their combined efforts, the screen buckled, folded, teetered and fell, cracking Marc solidly on the head. The next moment found him in an unconscious sprawl on the floor. The area behind the screen was starkly deserted. The observers crowded in swiftly to see what had happened. "Good God!" the doctor cried, staring down at Marc. "It's Pillsworth, the man they're looking for in Surgery!" "Is he dead?" the nurse asked. The doctor shook his head. "He's breathing. Run and call an orderly to take him along instantly. Hurry!" As the nurse hurried off, the elderly patient removed one of the crutches from the side of her chair and passed it experimentally through the vacant area beyond the screen. She shook her head in perplexity. "By golly," she said, "I could have _sworn_ he was talkin' to somebody back there." * * * * * While this untimely denouement was rounding out in the hallway, a mad drama of another sort was beginning to ferment in the Pharmacy. Olliphant Gunn, the rotund and habitually foggy keeper of the dopes and drugs, had been watching it for several minutes; there was trouble brewing in the Salts and Syrups--trouble of a most mysterious and upsetting nature. The containers, for all the world as though they had suddenly been endowed with some idiotic life of their own, had begun to shift about all by themselves. Watching a jar of salts hurl itself to the floor and splash its contents out in a whitish mess, Olliphant Gunn concluded definitely that there was some sort of flimflam afoot.