"Decidedly. The young lady is in extreme danger. Yes, Mr. Sheldon, in extreme danger. The mistake involved in her removal to-day is a mistake which I cannot denounce too strongly. If you had wanted to kill your stepdaughter, you could scarcely have pursued a more likely course for the attainment of your object. No doubt you were actuated by the most amiable motives. I can only regret that you should have acted without competent advice."
"I believed myself to be acting for the best," replied Philip Sheldon, in a strange mechanical way.
He was trying to estimate the true meaning of the Doctor's address. Was he merely expressing anger against an error of ignorance or stupidity, or was there a more fatal significance in his words?
"You overwhelm me," the stockbroker said presently; "you positively overwhelm me by your view of my daughter's condition. Dr. Doddleson apprehended no danger. He saw our dear girl on Sunday morning—yesterday morning," added Mr. Sheldon, wonder-stricken to find that the interval was so brief between the time in which he had walked with Valentine and Dr. Doddleson in the garden at Harold's Hill and the present moment. To Valentine it seemed still more wonderful. What a bridgeless gulf between yesterday morning and to-night! All his knowledge of this man Sheldon, all the horror involved in Tom Halliday's death, had come upon him in that brief span.
"I should like to see Dr. Doddleson's prescriptions," said Dr. Jedd, with grave politeness.
Mr. Sheldon produced them from his pocket-book with an unshaken hand. No change of countenance, no tremulous hand, no broken voice, betrayed his apprehension. The one distinguishing mark of his manner was an absent, half-mechanical tone, as of a man whose mind is employed otherwise than in the conversation of the moment. Prompt at calculation always, he was at this crisis engaged in a kind of mental arithmetic. "The chances of defeat, so much; the chances of detection—?"
A rapid survey of his position told him what those chances were. Detection by Dr. Jedd? Yes. That had come to him already perhaps. But would any actual harm to him come of such detection?
He calculated the chances for and against this—and the result was in his favour. That Dr. Jedd should form certain opinions of Miss Halliday's case was one thing; that he should give public utterance to those opinions was another thing.
"What can his opinion matter to me?" Mr. Sheldon asked himself; "opinion cannot touch me in a case where there is no such thing as certainty. He has seen the dilatation of the pupil—even that old fool Doddleson saw it—and has taken fright. But no jury in England would hang a man on such evidence as that; or if a jury could be found to put the rope round a man's neck, the British public and the British press would be pretty sure to get the rope taken off again."
"Chloric æther, spirits of ammonia—hum, ha, hum—yes," muttered Dr. Jedd, looking at one prescription. "Quinine, yes; aqua pura," he murmured, looking at another.