t was shut up in a pleasant room provided with double doors
and two strongly barred windows that overlooked a pretty garden,
beyond which there was a high brick wall half covered by a bright
creeper, then just beginning to flower. The walls, the doors, the
ceiling, and the floor were sound-proof, and the garden could not in
any way be reached without passing through the house.

As only male patients were received, the nurses and attendants were
all men; for the treatment needed more firmness and sometimes strength
than gentleness. It was uncompromising, as English methods often are.
Except where life was actually in danger, there was no drink and no
opium for anybody; when absolutely necessary the resident doctor
gave the patient hypodermics or something which he called by an
unpronounceable name, lest the sufferer should afterwards try to buy
it; he smilingly described it as a new vegetable poison, and in fact
it was nothing but dionine, a preparation of opium that differs but
little from ordinary morphia.

Now Sir Jasper Threlfall was a very great doctor indeed, and his
name commanded respect in London at large and inspired awe in the
hospitals. Even the profession admitted reluctantly that he did
not kill more patients than he cured, which is something for one
fashionable doctor to say of another; for the regular answer to any
inquiry about a rival practitioner is a smile--'a smile more dreadful
than his own dreadful frown'--an indescribable smile, a meaning smile,
a smile that is a libel in itself.

It had been an act of humanity to take the young man into medical
custody, as it were, and it had been more or less necessary for the
safety of the public, for Logotheti and the doctor had found him in a
really dangerous state, as was amply proved by his attempting to cut
his own throat and then to shoot Logotheti himself. Sir Jasper said he
had nothing especial the matter with him except drink, that when
his nerves had recovered their normal tone his real character would
appear, so that it would then be possible to judge more or less
whether he had will enough to control himself in future. Logotheti
agreed, but it occurred to him that one need not be knighted, and
write a dozen or more mysterious capital letters after one's name, and
live in Harley Street, in order to reach such a simple conclusion; and
as Logotheti was a millionaire, and liked his doctor for his own sake
rather than for his skill, he told him this,