"You've something to say to me," he answered, "probably a good deal more. Say it. Say anything you like, and be quite certain that I shan't be offended." "I will. It's this, Mr. Lothian. Your stomach will go on digesting and your heart performing its functions long after your brain has gone." Then there was silence in the sunlit bedroom. "You think that?" Lothian said at length, in a quiet voice. "I know it. You are on the verge of terrible nervous and mental collapse. I'm going to be brutal, but I'm going to speak the truth. Three months more of drinking as you have been of late and, for all effective purposes you go out!" Gilbert's face flushed purple with rage. "How dare you say such a thing to me, sir?" he cried. "How dare you tell me, tell _me_, that I have been drinking heavily. You are certainly wise to say it when there is no witness here!" Morton Sims smiled sadly. He was quite unmoved by Lothian's rage. It left him cool. But when he spoke, there was a hypnotic ring in his voice which caught at the weak and tremulous will of the man upon the bed and held it down. "Now really, Mr. Lothian!" he said, "what on earth is the use of talking like that to me? It means nothing. It does not express your real thought. Can you suppose that your condition is not an open book to _me_? You know that you wouldn't speak as you're doing if your nerves weren't in a terrible state. You have one of the finest minds in England; don't bring it to irremediable ruin for want of a helping hand." Lothian lay back on his pillow breathing quickly. He felt that his hands were trembling and he pushed them under the clothes. His legs were twitching and a spasm of cramp-pain shot into the calf of one of them. "Look here, Doctor," he said after a moment, "I spoke like a fool, which I'm not. I have been rather overdoing it lately. My work has been worrying me and I've been trying to whip myself up with alcohol." Morton Sims nodded. "Well, we'll soon put you right," he said. Mary Lothian had told him the true history of the case. For three years, at least, her husband had been drinking steadily, silent, persistent, lonely drinking. For a long time, a period of months to her own fear and horror-quickened knowledge, Lothian had been taking a quantity of spirits which she estimated at two-thirds of a bottle a day. Without enlightening her, and adding what an inebriate of this type could easily procure in addition, the doctor put the true quantity at about a bottle and a half--say for the last two months certainly. He knew also, that whatever else Lothian might do, either now or when he became more confidential, he would lie about the _quantity_ of spirits he was in the habit of consuming. Inebriates always do.