"G-R-R-R-r-r-r-r-r," growled the Clockwork man. "WOW--WOW--can't help it--WOUGH--WOUGH--most regrettable--wow--wow--atavism--tendency to return--remote species--moment's notice--family failing--_darwinism_--better in a moment--something gone wrong with the controls. _There_--_that's_ done it. Phew!" His face suddenly cleared, and all trace of the canine resemblance vanished as if by magic. He got up and took two or three jerk-like strides up and down the room. "Must keep going--when I feel like this--either food or violent stimulus--otherwise the confounded thing runs down--and there you are." He paused and confronted Allingham, who had risen from his chair and was still trembling. "How can I help it?" implored the Clockwork man, in despair. "They made me like this. I don't want to alarm you--but, you know, it alarms _me_ sometimes. You can't imagine how trying it is to feel that at any moment you might change into something else--some horrible tree-climbing ancestor. The thing ought not to happen, but it's always possible. They should have thought of that when they made the clock." "It mustn't happen," said the Doctor, recovering slightly, "that's the flat fact. If it's food you require, then food you shall have." It had suddenly flashed across his fevered mind that downstairs in the surgery there lay a collection of tinned foods and patent medicines, samples that had been sent for him to test. Rather than risk a further manifestation of collapse on the part of the Clockwork-man, he would sacrifice these. II He was only just in time. On the way down the stairs that led to the basement surgery the Clockwork man began to flap his ears violently, and it was then that the Doctor noticed for the first time this circumstance that had so puzzled Arthur Withers. But the faculty seemed, in comparison with other exhibitions, a mere trifle, a sort of mannerism that one might expect from a being so strangely constituted. Pushing his companion into the surgery, the Doctor commenced opening tins for all he was worth. The process calmed him, and he had time to think a little. For half an hour he opened tins, and passed them over to the Clockwork man, without noticing very much what the latter did with them. Then he went on to bottles containing patent foods, phosphates, hypophosphates, glycero-hypophosphates, all the phosphates in fact, combined with malt or other substances, which might be considered almost necessary as an auxiliary diet for the Clockwork man.