Now that suspicion, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a kind of doubting curiosity, had been aroused in the doctor's mind, it would not down; a dozen instances of slips or inconsistencies in Huddesley's conduct thronged upon him. He sat a long while, frowning in uncomfortable recollection; then got up at last, and halfway to the mantelpiece to get a cigar, paused again in puzzled meditation with his gaze on the floor. At his feet there lay the broken bits of Teddy's final glass in a sticky morass of Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine, that calamitous beverage, seeped into the nap of the carpet. Doctor Vardaman gathered up the largest pieces gingerly, and tried to fit them together; that set of glasses had been his mother's when she went to housekeeping. It was beyond mending, however, and he was on the point of tossing the shards into a waste-basket, when a fresh discovery restrained him. He sniffed at them, sniffed his fingers, got down on all-fours and laboriously sniffed the stained carpet. He rose; "Teddy didn't drink that glass," he said aloud. "He only drank the first one Huddesley gave him. But he had been drinking all evening." He smelled at some other glasses standing near the young man's place, but apparently could make nothing of them. He went hesitatingly toward the door of a little room opening upon the hall, and at the very threshold wavered in indecision. "Oh, this is all foolishness," he said. "How could Huddesley--what possible motive----?" He opened the door. It was a dark, windowless place, little more than a closet, which the doctor had put to all sorts of uses, experimenting with chemicals, photographic plates, raising mushrooms, the hundred-and-one devices of industrious idleness. Everything there was in a kind of handy masculine disorder, and he often boasted that he could go there in the dark and pick up whatever he wanted without a moment's hesitation. But now he struck a match, and ran an anxious eye along the shelves; he breathed a little freer when he discerned the bottle he sought in its accustomed place with contents undisturbed; it was colourless stuff. "All fancy! I'm getting as notional as an old woman," he said to himself, and was turning away, when some second thought prompted him to reach the bottle down from the shelf. His match had gone out; the doctor went into the parlour, where all the gas-jets were burning wastefully high, and some red tulips he had bought that afternoon to decorate his banquet flagged miserably in the old French china vases. He deliberately removed the cork, smelled it, hesitated, touched the bottle to his tongue. "Well, I'll be----," he ejaculated, facing his own pale and perturbed image in the old-fashioned gilt mantel-glass.