Lawrence puffed his cigarette in huge enjoyment.
"So far the oracle has spoken correctly," he went on. "The picture was in the shop window. The old man had no cheque book. He hurried home to get it, and by the time he returned the picture was gone. There's a pathetic little incident for you, quite in the fashion of a lady's novelette. The picturesque old man wants the picture and he offers you £200 for it, which you accept. He pays you in bank notes and you place these notes in your inner coat pocket."
"I shall wake up presently and find it a dream," said Bruce. "If you had been present at the interview you could not have described it better."
"End of the first act," Lawrence said with pardonable triumph. "You are just going into your rooms when a motor comes up. It looks like a coincidence, but the driver has been lurking about waiting for you. Do you suppose it was chance that you were picked out of all the doctors in London?"
"I thought, perhaps," Bruce began, "that my name----"
"Fiddlesticks! You are the victim of a vile conspiracy, my dear fellow, if ever there was one. Now let me go on with my visions. The motor is an unusually silent one, and it was painted a dull, lustreless black."
"Correct to a fault," Bruce cried.
"Well, we shall hear more of that lustreless black motor later on when I come to go closely into the mystery and show the police what asses they are. You address a question to the driver and he turns out to be dumb. He takes you to the corner house, where you are received by a fair woman with a mantilla over her head so that you have the very vaguest idea of her features. If you were asked to swear to her identity you couldn't do it I suppose?"
"At the present moment I could not swear to my own," Bruce said helplessly.
"Well, you can leave other people to do that. You find your patient half dead between drink and drugs, and after a time you pull him round. As you go away you sign to the Spanish woman that you are coming again. She says no, and by means of a Bradshaw and some labelled luggage--say to Dover--leads you to believe that the people of the house are going abroad at once."