"Keep the power of disclosure in your own hands, Dick. Above all things, do that. Why did she produce the child's clothes? Woman's wit is hard to follow. 'My word against all the world,' she meant, I believe. As if she must be believed on her bare assertion, against all the facts that could be brought against her. It was her pride. Like all female leaders, she is incredibly proud. She means to stand up and deny. On the other hand, the situation is harassing; there are points in the case which make it almost impossible----" "The goings-on of my ill-conditioned brother, I suppose?" "Perhaps--perhaps. I wish she had told me when and how the child died." They dined together. Over an excellent bottle of Chateau Mouton they exchanged further confidences. "My dear Dick," said the doctor, "it's a serious situation. You propose to cover a woman of the highest reputation with infamy. She says, in effect, 'You are quite right. I am that infamous person. But prove it.' You want to restore to another most amiable and honourable woman her son, and he would break her heart in a year. You want me to identify the lady, and thereby to confess my share in a transaction which might be made to look like complicity in a fraud and a conspiracy. I told her at the time that it looked like substitution, though she called it adoption. Well, I can imitate the lady's frankness; that is to say, I do not in so many words confess the truth, but I show it; I allow you to conclude that the thing is true. And, like the lady, I defy you. You will find out nothing more. And if you were to put me in the box--if you were to make me tell the truth about that infernal babe--never, never would I confess to knowing the name of the lady. And without that evidence you can never prove your case." * * * * * As a rule, the doctor was the last man in the world either to dream or to trouble himself with dreams; nevertheless, there fell upon him an incubus of the night which was so persistent, that, though he waked a dozen times and shook off the thing, a dozen times it came again. And so vivid was it that he saw it still when he awoke in the morning, and heard it, and remembered it, and felt it. For in this dream he saw himself giving evidence in a court of law as to his own share in the substitution of another child for the dead child. And in the dream he saw himself losing reputation, character, practice, everything. As the evidence was reluctantly given, he saw the face of the judge growing more and more severe, the faces of the jury harder, the faces in the court more hostile. He read in all his own condemnation. This is what he had to say.