She smiled and concurred. But I could see that I had not convinced her. And I began to suspect that she was not after all so intelligent as I had imagined. My patient, who was not now in any pain, lay calmly, with closed eyes.
III.
Do not forget the old bald-headed lawyer in the drawing-room.
“I suppose you are often summoned to the Grand Babylon, sir, living, as you do, just round the corner,” he remarked to me somewhat pompously. He had a big nose and a habit of staring at you over his eye-glasses with his mouth wide-open, after having spoken. We were alone together in the drawing-room. I was waiting for the arrival of the medicine, and he was waiting for—I didn’t know what he was waiting for.
“Occasionally. Not often,” I responded. “I am called more frequently to the Majestic, over the way.”
“Ah, just so, just so,” he murmured.
I could see that he meant to be polite in his high and dry antique legal style; and I could see also that he was very bored in that hotel drawing-room. So I proceeded to explain the case to him, and to question him discreetly about my patient and Miss Russell.
“You are, of course, aware, sir, that the young lady is Miss Spanton, Miss Adelaide Spanton?” he said.
“What? Not ‘the’ Spanton?”
“Precisely, sir. The daughter of Edgar Spanton, my late client, the great newspaper proprietor.”