One morning a week later, stopping at the desk for his mail, Dick became aware of some extra commotion outside: Patient Von Cohn Morris was going away. His parents, Australians, were putting his baggage vehemently into a large limousine, and beside them stood Doctor Ladislau protesting with ineffectual attitudes against the violent gesturings of Morris, senior. The young man was regarding his embarkation with aloof cynicism as Doctor Diver approached.

“Isn’t this a little sudden, Mr. Morris?”

Mr. Morris started as he saw Dick — his florid face and the large checks on his suit seemed to turn off and on like electric lights. He approached Dick as though to strike him.

“High time we left, we and those who have come with us,” he began, and paused for breath. “It is high time, Doctor Diver. High time.”

“Will you come in my office?” Dick suggested.

“Not I! I’ll talk to you, but I’m washing my hands of you and your place.”

He shook his finger at Dick. “I was just telling this doctor here. We’ve wasted our time and our money.”

Doctor Ladislau stirred in a feeble negative, signalling up a vague Slavic evasiveness. Dick had never liked Ladislau. He managed to walk the excited Australian along the path in the direction of his office, trying to persuade him to enter; but the man shook his head.

“It’s you, Doctor Diver, YOU, the very man. I went to Doctor Ladislau because you were not to be found, Doctor Diver, and because Doctor Gregorovius is not expected until the nightfall, and I would not wait. No, sir! I would not wait a minute after my son told me the truth.”

He came up menacingly to Dick, who kept his hands loose enough to drop him if it seemed necessary. “My son is here for alcoholism, and he told us he smelt liquor on your breath. Yes, sir!” He made a quick, apparently unsuccessful sniff. “Not once, but twice Von Cohn says he has smelt liquor on your breath. I and my lady have never touched a drop of it in our lives. We hand Von Cohn to you to be cured, and within a month he twice smells liquor on your breath! What kind of cure is that there?”

Dick hesitated; Mr. Morris was quite capable of making a scene on the clinic drive.

“After all, Mr. Morris, some people are not going to give up what they regard as food because of your son —”

“But you’re a doctor, man!” cried Morris furiously. “When the workmen drink their beer that’s bad ‘cess to them — but you’re here supposing to cure —”

“This has gone too far. Your son came to us because of kleptomania.”

“What was behind it?” The man was almost shrieking. “Drink — black drink. Do you know what color black is? It’s black! My own uncle was hung by the neck because of it, you hear? My son comes to a sanitarium, and a doctor reeks of it!”

“I must ask you to leave.”

“You ASK me! We ARE leaving!”

“If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to date. Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a patient —”

“You dare to use the word temperate to me?”

Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached, said: “Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”

He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just inside the door. He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he tippled with gin in the afternoons — gin was the most difficult to detect on the breath. He was averaging a half- pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.

Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a régime that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only f............