Leigh was the calm, cold, collected physician once again, and he spoke in a strange tone that he did not know as his own.
“Xyrania,” he said; and he went to a case of bottles and jars, took down one of the former, poured a small quantity into a phial, corked it, and said solemnly—
“Lead the way, sir—quick; but I must tell you that an overdose of that drug means sleep from which there is no awaking.”
Garstang uttered a low, harsh sound, and motioned towards the door, leading the way; while Leigh followed him, with his brain feeling, in addition to the terrific crushing weight of depression as if all the world were nothing now, confused and strange, as he wondered that the man did not recognise him; and too much stunned to grasp the fact that he who had filled so large a measure of his thoughts for months had never met him face to face—probably had never heard of him, save as some doctor in practice at Northwood.
Then, as they hurried along the pavement, and at the end of another hundred yards turned into Great Ormond Street, Leigh felt oppressed by another thought—that after all, Kate, if it were she he was being taken to see, must have been for months past in the house he had so often gazed at in passing, with an intense desire to enter, but had always crushed down that desire, telling himself that it was insane.
Meanwhile Garstang was talking to him in a hurried excited tone, uttering words that hardly reached his companion’s understanding; but he caught fragments about “unhappy temper—insomnia—indulgence in the potent drug—his agony and despair”—and then he cried wildly, as he paused at the door of the familiar house with its overhanging eaves, and inserted the latch-key:
“Doctor—any fee you like to demand, but you must save my wife’s life.”
“Must save his wife’s life!” groaned Leigh, mentally, as his heart gave what seemed to be one heavy throb. Then he stepped into the great gloomy hall.