Frauenthal turned his clinical stare on E. H. Merriwether, as though the financier were really the patient. He swept the little man's face—the eyes, the mouth, and the poise—and then let his eyes linger on the clenched fingers about the newspaper.
The iron-nerved, glacial-blooded, flint-hearted Merriwether could not control himself after forty-five seconds of this. He flung the newspaper on the floor violently.
“Go ahead!” he said, harshly.
The doctor did not smile outwardly; but you felt that within himself he had found an answer to one of his own unspoken questions about the father of the suspect.
“There are, Mr. E. H. Merriwether,” he began, in the measured tones and overcareful enunciation of a lecturer at a clinic, “various forms of—let us say—madness; and your son Tom, a fine young man of twenty-eight, is quite unmistakably suffering from—”
He paused to give the fine young man's emotionless father an opportunity to show human feelings. Frauenthal was always interested in the struggle between the emotional and the physical in his millionaire patients.
“Go on!” said E. H. Merriwether, so very coldly as to irritate.
His eyes never left the alienist's own secret-draggers; but he was drumming on his thigh with the tips of his uncontrollable fingers. Ordinarily his desk would have screened from sight this betrayal of human feeling.
“Your son, sir, is suffering, beyond any question, from the oldest madness of all—love!”
“What?”