Then he knew where he was, and precisely why he was there; and it was the mental equivalent of what Mr. Croucher called "'ot coppers," only this made him hot all over. He might have been in a fever; he hoped violently that he was. He remembered his cough, and began to practise it. A determined paroxysm revived his spirits; he was not fit to get up, and other people would just have to wait until he was, and serve 'em jolly well right! Other people couldn't get at him there; yet one other person could, and did, to Mr. Croucher's mingled discomfort and relief. The doctor duly kept him in bed; but there was too much of the doctor; and yet the time hung heaviest when he was not there, and there were heavier burdens even than the time. The patient had lost his liking for a book. Conversation was more to his taste this time. His mind would wander when he read. It would follow the doctor down-stairs to his consulting-room, or across the landing to the room in which he slept. The man haunted him; it was better to have him there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher continually saw him when he was not there at all. Better, again, to talk of some things than to dwell on them night and day, especially when those subjects seemed to possess an equally awful fascination for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in his line; that accounted for the doctor's morbid taste, and the patient's most terrible experience was quite enough to account for his. There was nothing unnatural in their talks. They had the thing in common, only from opposite poles of experience, which enormously enhanced the mutual interest. If there was one subject they were bound to have discussed, with no false delicacy on either side, each being what he was, it was the subject of the sixth commandment. "Of course you think about it," said Dollar, dismissing an incoherent excuse on the second day. "It must haunt you; it's only natural that it should. All I should like you to do, since you never committed one, and are the last man in the world to commit one now, is to take a rather lighter view of that particular misdeed." "A lighter view!" repeated Croucher, goggling; and he added with a shuddering inconsequence: "The lor o' the land don't make light of it!" "Literature has been known to," rejoined the doctor, with as little apparent point. "But you are not the reader you were last year; otherwise there's a little thing, _On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_, that I should like to lend you." "One o' the 'ow much?" said Mr. Croucher, uncertain whether to grin, or frown, and meanwhile glaring more than he supposed.