stended
slightly, and an air of disgust chased the inane look as he breathed the
unpleasant medicinal druggy air.

"I was just busy over my discovery," continued the doctor blandly, "and
I thought as a friend you would not mind coming here--it is the
consulting-room, my dear Poynter; and I could go on, and we could chat
over your ailment the while."

"Oh, it's all the same to me," said Poynter; and, once out of Richmond's
presence, he seemed another being. Instead of carrying his glossy hat
in his hand, he had resumed it, and wore it with a vulgar cock; he
walked with the swagger of the low-class City man; and his face shone as
he whisked out a second crimson silk handkerchief redolent of perfume,
and blew his nose with a loud blast, which sounded defiant.

"Here we are," said the doctor, smiling at his patient, as if after a
long search he had found the ill which troubled him, and pulled it up by
the roots. "Take that chair, my dear Poynter," he continued, pointing
to one by the fire, where a bright copper kettle was on the hob, and
closing the door, while his patient took off his hat, glanced round the
room, and blew the dust off the top of a side table before depositing
thereon his new head-covering.

There was a litter on the table, a chemist's set of weights and scales,
divers papers, a spatula, pestle and mortar of glass, toy-like in size,
and a book with memoranda, and pen and ink.

"Very busy, you see, Poynter; I've nearly completed my task, and in a
few months, perhaps weeks, the medical world will be startled by my
discovery."

"What are you going to do with it when you've done?"

"Do with it?"

"Yes. Now, if I was you, I should say to a friend, `Lend me a thou.,'
and then take a little shop, put it up in bottles, with three-halfpenny
stamps, and advertise it well as the new patent medicine."

"My dear Mr Poynter!"

"Hold hard, doctor, I haven't done," he cried, speaking in a hard,
browbeating manner, as if he were giving orders. "Give it a spanking
name, `Heal-all,' or `Cure all;' won't do to say Kill-all eh? Haw, haw,
haw!"

He burst into a coarse, loud laugh, and the doctor sank back in his
chair, with his brows twitching slightly.

"Hold hard, I have it. Nothing like a good name for the fools who
swallow everything. Get something out of one of your Greek and Latin
physic-books--one of those words like hippocaustus or allegorus, or
something they can't understand."

"I do not quite