Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter with sepulchral injunctions.
"Are you telling him about our medical scandal?" he inquired briskly of the bride. "My dear doctor, it'll make your professional hair stand on end! Here's the local practitioner been prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!"
"So I hear," said the crime doctor, dryly.
"The poor brute has been frightfully overworked," continued Edenborough, in deference to a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of the British faculty. "They say he was up two whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doctor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows doing their level best to lay themselves out. We've had two concussions of the brain and one complicated fracture this very week. Still, to go and give your patient a hundred times more strychnine than you intended——"
And he stopped himself, as though the subject, which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest, was rather near home after all.
"But what about his patient?" adroitly inquired the doctor. "If half that one hears is true, he wouldn't have been much loss."
"Not much, I'm afraid," said Lucy Edenborough, with the air of a Roman matron turning down her thumbs.
"He's a fellow who was at my private school, just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool of himself," exclaimed Edenborough, touching his glass. "It's an awful pity. He used to be such a nice little chap, Jack Laverick."
"He was nice enough when he was out here a year ago," the bride admitted, "and he's still a sportsman. He won half the toboggan races last season, and took it all delightfully; he's quite another person now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of everything else. Still, I shall expect Mr. Laverick either to sweep the board or break his neck. He evidently wasn't born to be poisoned."
"Did he come to grief last year, Mrs. Edenborough?"