Tumpany's ears were keen, like those of most wildfowlers,--he heard voices coming along the passage towards the bedroom. The door opened and Morton Sims came in with Mary. He shook hands with Gilbert, admired Tumpany's leash of duck, and then, left alone with the poet, sat down upon the bed. The two men regarded each other with interest. They were both "personalities" and both of them made their mark in their several ways. "Good heavens!" the doctor was thinking. "What a brilliant brain's hidden behind those lint bandages! This is the man who can make the throat swell with sorrow and the heart leap high with hope! With all my learning and success, I can only bring comfort to people's bowels or cure insomnia. This fellow here can heal souls--like a priest! Even for me--now and then--he has unlocked the gates of fairyland." "Good Lord!" Gilbert said to himself. "What wouldn't I give to be a fellow like this fellow. He is great. He can put a drug into one's body and one's soul awakes! He's got a magic wand. He waves it, and sanity returns. He pours out of a bottle and blind eyes once more see God, dull ears hear music! I go and get drunk at Amberleys' house and cringe before a Toftrees, Mon Dieu! This man can never go away from a house without leaving a sense of loss behind him." --"Well, how are you, Mr. Lothian?" "Much better, thanks, Doctor. I'm feeling quite fit, in fact." "Yes, but you're not, you know. I made a complete examination of you yesterday, you remember, and now I've tabulated the results." "Tell me then." "If you weren't who you are, I wouldn't tell you at all, being who you are, I will." Lothian nodded. "Fire away!" he said with his sweet smile, his great charm of manner--all the greater for the enforced abstinence of the last three days--"I shan't funk anything you tell me." "Very well, then. Your liver is beginning--only beginning--to be enlarged. You've got a more or less permanent catarrh of the stomach, and a permanent catarrh of the throat and nasal passages from membranes inflamed by alcohol and constant cigarette smoking. And there is a hint of coming heart trouble, too." Lothian laughed, frankly enough. "I know all that," he said. "Really, Doctor, there's nothing very dreadful in that. I'm as strong as a horse, really!" "Yes, you are, in one way. Your constitution is a fine one. I was talking to your man-servant yesterday and I know what you are able to go through when you are shooting in the winter. I would not venture upon such risks myself even." "Then everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds?" Gilbert answered lightly, feeling sure that the other would take him. "Unfortunately, in your case, it's _not_," Morton Sims replied. "You seem to forget two things about 'Candide'--that Dr. Pangloss was a failure and a fool, and that one must cultivate one's garden! Voltaire was a wise man!" Gilbert dropped his jesting note.