“One dozen shirts,” he read, “four under-flannels, four pair socks, one dozen handkerchiefs, two sleeping-suits—marked Francis Beveridge! the account rendered to Dr G. Twiddel! What in the name of wonderment is the meaning of this?”
He sat down with the bill in his hand and gazed hard at it.
“Precisely my outfit,” he said to himself.
“Am I—Does it——? What a rum thing!”
He sat for about ten minutes looking hard at the floor. Then he burst out laughing, resumed in a moment his [pg 115] air of philosophical opportunism, and set about a further search of the desk. He looked at the bills and seemed to find nothing more to interest him. Then he glanced at one or two letters in the drawers, threw the first few back again, and at last paused over one.
“Twiddel to Billson,” he said to himself. “This may possibly be worth looking at.”
It was dated more than a month back from the town of Fogelschloss.
“Dear Tom,” it ran, “we are having an A 1 time. Old Welsh is in splendid form, doing the part to perfection. He has never given himself away yet, not even when drunk, which, I am sorry to say, he has been too often. But then old Welsh is so funny when he is drunk that it makes him all the more like the original, or at least what the original is supposed to be.
“Of course we don’t dare to venture into places where we would see too many English. This is quite an amusing place for a German town, some baths and a kind of a gambling-table, and some pretty girls—for Germans. There is a sporting aristocrat here, in an old castle, who is very friendly, and is much impressed with Welsh’s account of his family plate and deer-forest, and has asked us once or twice to come out and see him. We are no end of swells, I assure you.
“Ta, ta, old chap. Hope the practice prospers in your hands. Don’t kill all the patients before I come back.—Ever thine,