"I don't wonder at it."
"Yet it wasn't Mostyn Scarth who gave Doctor Alt away."
"No?"
Edenborough shook his head as they left the lift together. "No, doctor. It was the chemist here, a chap called Schickel; but for him Jack Laverick would be a dead man; and but for him again, nobody need ever have heard of his narrow shave. He spotted the mistake, and then started all the gossip."
"I know," said the doctor, nodding.
"But it was a terrible mistake! Decigrams instead of milligrams, so I heard. Just a hundred times too much strychnine in each pill."
"You are quite right," said John Dollar quietly. "I have the prescription in my pocket."
"You have, doctor?"
"Don't be angry with me, my dear fellow! I told you I had heard one version of the whole thing. It was Alt's. He's an old friend—but you wouldn't have said a word about him if I had told you that at first—and I still don't want it generally known."
"You can trust me, doctor, after all you've done for me."