"Have you enjoyed your usual good health during your residence abroad?"
"Never better in my life. I have not had a moment's illness since you last saw me."
"And how have you prospered in your business enterprises?"
"Reasonably well; but pray doctor, let us confine ourselves to the matter in hand. I have come for friendly, not professional, advice."
"All in good time, my boy," he calmly remarked. This was tantalizing. My strange narrative did not seem to have disturbed his serenity in the least degree.
"Did you have a pleasant passage?" he asked, after a brief pause. "The ocean, I believe, is generally rough at this time of year."
"I felt a little squeamish for a day or two after leaving Melbourne," I replied, "but I soon got over it, and it was not very bad even while it lasted. I am a tolerably good sailor."
"And you have had no special ground of anxiety of late? At least not until you received this wonderful letter"—he added, with a perceptible contraction of his lips, as though trying to repress a smile.
Then I saw what he was driving at.
"Doctor," I exclaimed, with some exasperation in my tone—"pray dismiss from your mind the idea that what I have told you is the result of diseased imagination. I am as sane as you are. The letter itself affords sufficient evidence that I am not quite such a fool as you take me for."