The Prince nodded.
“You are the man I thought you were, doctor,” he said. “The first condition, then, is this. You see the sitting room we are now in—a pleasant little apartment, I think,—books, you see, papers, a smoking cabinet in which I can assure you that you will find the finest Havana cigars and the best cigarettes to be procured in London. Through here”—the Prince threw open an inner door—“is a small sleeping apartment. It has, as you see, the same outlook. It is comfortable if not luxurious.”
The doctor sighed.
“I am not used to luxury,” he said.
“These two rooms will be yours,” the Prince announced, “and the first condition of our arrangement is that until two months are up, or our engagement is finished, you do not leave them.”
The doctor stared at him blankly.
“Are you in earnest, sir?” he asked.
“In absolute earnest,” the Prince assured him. “Not only that, but I require you to keep your whereabouts, until after the period of time I have mentioned, an entire secret from every one. I gather that you are not married, and that there is no one living in your house to whom it would seem necessary to disclose your movements. In any case, this is another of my conditions. You are neither to write nor receive any letters whilst here. You are to figure in the neighborhood from which you came as a man who has disappeared,—as a man, in short, who has found it impossible to pay his way and has preferred simply to slip out of his place. At the end of two months you can reappear or not, as you choose. That rests with yourself.”
The doctor smiled faintly. To make some sort of disappearance had been his precise intention, but to disappear in this fashion and make his return to the world with a thousand guineas in his pocket, had not exactly come within the scope of his imagination. It was a situation full of allurements. Nevertheless he was bewildered.
“I am to live in these two rooms?” he demanded. “I am to let no one know where I am, to write no letters, to receive none? My duties are to be simply to treat you?”