"If you mean the strychnine affair," returned Dollar, with a certain deliberation, "I heard one version before I had been in the place an hour. I can't say that I did like it. But I should be interested to know what you both think about it all." Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter with sepulchral injunctions. "Are you telling him about our medical scandal?" he inquired briskly of the bride. "My dear doctor, it'll make your professional hair stand on end! Here's the local practitioner been prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!" "So I hear," said the crime doctor, dryly. "The poor brute has been frightfully overworked," continued Edenborough, in deference to a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of the British faculty. "They say he was up two whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doctor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows doing their level best to lay themselves out. We've had two concussions of the brain and one complicated fracture this very week. Still, to go and give your patient a hundred times more strychnine than you intended----" And he stopped himself, as though the subject, which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest, was rather near home after all. "But what about his patient?" adroitly inquired the doctor. "If half that one hears is true, he wouldn't have been much loss." "Not much, I'm afraid," said Lucy Edenborough, with the air of a Roman matron turning down her thumbs. "He's a fellow who was at my private school, just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool of himself," exclaimed Edenborough, touching his glass. "It's an awful pity. He used to be such a nice little chap, Jack Laverick." "He was nice enough when he was out here a year ago," the bride admitted, "and he's still a sportsman. He won half the toboggan races last season, and took it all delightfully; he's quite another person now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of everything else. Still, I shall expect Mr. Laverick either to sweep the board or break his neck. He evidently wasn't born to be poisoned." "Did he come to grief last year, Mrs. Edenborough?" "He only nearly had one of his ears cut off, in a spill on the ice-run. So they said; but he was tobogganing again next day." "Doctor Alt looked after him all right then, I hear," added Edenborough, as the champagne arrived. "But I only wish _you_ could take the fellow in hand! He really used to be a decent chap, but it would take even you all your time to make him one again, Doctor Dollar." The crime doctor smiled as he raised his glass and returned compliments across the bubbles. It was the smile of a man with bigger fish to fry. Yet it was he who came back to the subject of young Laverick, asking if he had not a tutor or somebody to look after him, and what the man meant by not doing his job.