Brandon felt a sudden chill of soul as he was lifted by his chauffeur and his valet from the car and carried into the light and the suffocating warmth beyond those ornate, nail-studded doors. The place was overheated, yet to Brandon it had an effect of sudden immersion in icy water. There was something in its atmosphere which struck right down to the roots of his being. It was so subtle yet so deadly that a nausea came upon him. And yet, as he was soon to realize, this emotion had its source in his own weakness, in his own state of extreme mental tension. Brandon was carried into a private room and was there received by the chief medical officer, Dr. Thorp, to whom he was known by hearsay. And it was his privilege to have a conversation with a humane and enlightened man, which interested him profoundly. Dr. Thorp stood very high in his profession, and his many years’ experience of mental cases was wide and deep. For him the subject with which he dealt, terrible as it was, had an all-absorbing interest. It offered to the researches of science a boundless field; moreover, this expert had a power over himself, and was therefore able to keep a sane, cool, balanced judgment in the midst of perils which too often overthrew his fellow workers. In a word, he could detach the part from the whole and so prevent the mind from being subdued to that in which it worked. In Dr. Thorp’s cozy room, under the bust of Æsculapius, Brandon had a talk in which he learned many things. The chief medical officer spoke with a frankness, a fair-minded desire to be impartial, which Brandon somehow had not looked for. To begin with he did not hesitate to describe the case of John Smith as quite the most remarkable that had ever come into his ken. And the fact that Brandon had known him intimately for many years, that he had always been his friend and champion, and that grievously stricken as he was, he had come to see him now, appeared in the eyes of Dr. Thorp to give this visitor an importance altogether unusual. “I welcome you here, Mr. Brandon, for several reasons,” he said. “Apart from the fact that you pay John’s bills every quarter, and that he always speaks of you in the most affectionate terms, I am hoping that you will be able to add to our knowledge of the dear fellow himself.” Somehow Brandon was a little startled by the epithet. It had an odd sound on official lips. He would have expected it to fall almost as soon from the governor of a jail. The doctor met Brandon’s look of surprise with a smile. “It’s the only way to describe him,” he said. “But he is a great puzzle to us all. And if in any way you can help us to solve him we shall be much in your debt.” “There is little I can tell you,” said Brandon, “that you don’t already know. And that little I’ll preface with a simple statement which I hope will not annoy you too much. It’s my unshakable belief that John Smith ought not to be here.”