ked, in deciphering a telegram which had just reached him, and
which was only intelligible through a key to the cipher.

"So, then, doctor, it is simply the return of an old attack,--a thing to
be expected, in fact, at his time of life?"

"Precisely, sir. He had one last autumn twelve month, brought on by a
fit of passion. The old Commodore gives way, rather, to temper."

"Ah! gives way, does he?" muttered Maitland, while he mumbled below his
breath, "'seventeen thousand and four D + X, and a gamba,'--a very large
blood-letting. By the way, doctor, is not bleeding--bleeding largely--a
critical remedy with a man of seventy-six or seven?"

"Very much so, indeed, sir; and, if you observe, I only applied some
leeches to the _nuchae_. You misapprehended me in thinking I took blood
from him freely."

"Oh, yes, very true," said Maitland, recovering himself. "I have no
doubt you treated him with great judgment. It is a case, too, for much
caution. Forty-seven and two G's," and he hastily turned over the leaves
of his little book, muttering continually, "and two G's, forty-six,
forty-seven, with two B's, two F's. Ah! here it is. Shivering attacks
are dangerous--are they--in these cases?"

"In which cases?" asked the doctor; for his shrewd intelligence at once
perceived the double object which Maitland was trying to contemplate.

"In a word, then," continued Maitland, not heeding the doctor's
question, but bending his gaze fixedly on the piece of paper before him,
scrawled over and blotted by his own hand,--"in a word, then, a man
of seventy, seized with paralysis, and, though partially rallied by
bleeding, attacked with shivering, is in a very critical state? But how
long might he live in that way?"

"We are not now speaking of Commodore Graham, I apprehend?" asked the
doctor, slyly.

"No; I am simply putting a case,--a possible case, Doctors, I know, are
not fond of these imagined emergencies; lawyers like them."

"Doctors dislike them," broke in Reede, "because they are never given to
them in any completeness,--every important sign of pulse and tongue and
temperature omitted--"

"Of course you are right," said Maitland, crumpling up the telegram and
the other papers; "and now for the Commodore. You are not apprehensive
of anything serious, I hope?"

"It 's an anxious case, sir,--a very anxious case; he 's eighty-four."

"Eighty-four!" repeated Maitland, to whom the words conveyed a
considerable significance.