or, named Toole; an ignoramus, I fear.'

And with this preface he concisely repeated the technical description
which he had compiled from various club conversations of Dr. Toole's, to
which no person imagined he had been listening so closely.

'If that's the case, Sir, 'twill kill him.'

'Kill or cure, Sir, 'tis the only chance,' rejoined Dangerfield.

'What sort is the wife, Sir?' asked Black Dillon, with a very odd look,
while his eye still rested on the short note that poor Mrs. Sturk had
penned.

'A nervous little woman of some two or three and forty,' answered the
spectacles.

The queer look subsided. He put the note in his pocket, and looked
puzzled, and then he asked--'

'Is he any way related to you, Sir?'

'None in life, Sir. But that does not affect, I take it, the medical
question.'

'No, it does _not_ affect the medical question--nothing _can_,' observed
the surgeon, in a sulky, sardonic way.

'Of course not,' answered the oracle of the silver spectacles, and both
remained silent for a while.

'You want to have him speak? Well, suppose there's a hundred chances to
one the trepan kills him on the spot--what then?' demanded the surgeon,
uncomfortably.

Dangerfield pondered, also uncomfortably for a minute, but answered
nothing; on the contrary, he demanded--

'And what then, Sir?'

'But here, in this case,' said Black Dillon, 'there's no chance at all,
do you see, there's _no_ chance, good, bad, or indifferent; none at
all.'

'But _I_ believe there _is_,' replied Dangerfield, decisively.

'You believe, but _I_ know.'

'See, Sir,' said Dangerfield, darkening, and speaking with a strange
snarl; 'I know what I'm about. I've a desire, Sir, that he should speak,
if 'twere only two minutes of conscious articulate life, and then
death--'tis not a pin's point to me how soon. Left to himself he must
die; therefore, to shrink from the operation on which depends the
discovery both of his actual murderer and of his money, Sir, otherwise
lost to his family, is--is a damned affectation! _I_ think it--so do
_you_, Sir; and I offer five hundred guineas as your fee, and Mrs.
Sturk's letter to bear you harmless.'

Then there was a pause. Dangerfield knew the man's character as well as
his skill. There were things said about him darker than we have hinted
at.

The surgeon looked very queer and gloomy down upon the table, and
scratched his head, and he mumbled gruffly--

'You see--you know--'tis a larg