"It's pretty difficult to prevent. A glass about does it, as I told you, and you can't be at a fellow's elbow all the time in a place like this. But some of Jack's old pals have had a go at him. Do you know what they've done? They've taken away his Old Etonian tie, and quite right too!" "And there was nothing of all this last year?" "So Lucy says. I wasn't here. Mrs. Laverick was, by the way; she may have made the difference. But being his own master seems to have sent him to the dogs altogether. Scarth's the only person to pull him up, unless--unless you'd take him on, doctor! You--you've pulled harder cases out of the fire, you know!" They had been sitting a few minutes in the lounge. Nobody was very near them; the young man's face was alight and his eyes were shining. Dollar took him by the arm once more, and they went together to the lift. "In any case I must make friends with your friend Scarth," said he. "Do you happen to know his number?" Edenborough did--it was 144--but he seemed dubious as to another doctor's reception after the tragedy that might have happened in the adjoining room. "Hadn't I better introduce you in the morning?" he suggested with much deference in the lift. "I--I hate repeating things--but I want you to like each other, and I heard Scarth say he was fed up with doctors!" This one smiled. "I don't wonder at it." "Yet it wasn't Mostyn Scarth who gave Doctor Alt away." "No?" Edenborough shook his head as they left the lift together. "No, doctor. It was the chemist here, a chap called Schickel; but for him Jack Laverick would be a dead man; and but for him again, nobody need ever have heard of his narrow shave. He spotted the mistake, and then started all the gossip." "I know," said the doctor, nodding. "But it was a terrible mistake! Decigrams instead of milligrams, so I heard. Just a hundred times too much strychnine in each pill." "You are quite right," said John Dollar quietly. "I have the prescription in my pocket." "_You_ have, doctor?" "Don't be angry with me, my dear fellow! I told you I had heard one version of the whole thing. It was Alt's. He's an old friend--but you wouldn't have said a word about him if I had told you that at first--and I still don't want it generally known." "You can trust me, doctor, after all you've done for me." "Well, Alt once did more for me. I want to do something for him, that's all." And his knuckles still ached from the young man's grip as they rapped smartly at the door of No. 144. II It was opened a few inches by Mostyn Scarth. His raiment was still at concert pitch, but his face even darker than it had been as the crime doctor saw it last. "May I ask who you are and what you want?" he demanded--not at all in the manner of Mr. Jingle--rather in the voice that most people would have raised. "My name's Dollar and I'm a doctor."