"I have had a shock," he said, with an air of strange perplexity, as he looked into their anxious faces. "What was it? What has happened to me?"
"You have been near to death's door," replied the physician, gravely, "but you will recover now."
"I wish that I had died!" the young man burst out, with such passionate realization of his misery, that the doctor exclaimed, incautiously:
"So, then, you did try to commit suicide?"
The brilliant, dark eyes looked at him in amazement.
"Suicide! suicide!" he repeated, blankly. "Who dares to say that of me?"
The doctor regarded him thoughtfully.
"My dear sir," he said, quietly, "I happened in here very opportunely last evening and found you suffering all the terrible symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Your friends feared that your grief had unhinged your mind, and that under temporary aberration you had attempted the destruction of your own life."
"They were wrong. I could never have been such a coward," Bertram answered, in such a tone of convincing truthfulness that no one could doubt him. "Indeed, doctor, you must have been mistaken. I have taken no drug recently."
"I am not mistaken," the physician asserted, confidently. "You had most certainly had arsenic administered to you in a draught of wine."