A knock, just then, at the door of Mr. Cranbrooke's comfortable bachelor sitting-room was followed by the appearance inside of it of a man, at sight of whom Cranbrooke's careworn and puzzled countenance brightened perceptibly.
"Ha! Shepard!" he said, rising to bestow on the newcomer a hearty grip of the hand. "Did you divine how much I wanted to talk to a fellow who has pursued exactly your line of study, and one, too, who, more than any other I happen to be acquainted with, knows just how far mind may be made to influence matter in preventing catastrophe, when—but, there, what am I to do? It's another man's affair,—a confidence that must be held inviolable."
"Give me the case hypothetically," said Shepard, dropping, according to custom, into a leathern chair out at elbows but full of comfort to the spine of reclining man, while accepting one of Cranbrooke's galaxy of famously tinted pipes.
"I think I will try to do so," rejoined his friend, "since upon it hangs the weal or woe of two people, in their way more interesting to me than any others in the world."
"I am all ears," said Dr. Shepard, fixing upon Cranbrooke the full gaze of a pair of deep-set orbs that had done their full share of looking intelligently into the mystery of cerebral vagaries. Cranbrooke, as well as he could, told the gist of Pollock's letter, expressing his opinion that to a man of the writer's temperament the conviction of approaching death was as good as an actual death-warrant.
Shepard, who asked nothing better than an intelligent listener when launched upon his favorite theories, kept the floor for fifteen minutes in a brilliant offhand discourse full of technicalities intermingled with sallies of strong original thought, to which Cranbrooke listened, as men in such a case are wont to do, in fascinated silence.
"But this is generalizing," the doctor interrupted himself at last. "What you want is a special discussion of your friend's condition. Of course, not knowing his physical state, I can't pretend to say how long it is likely to be before that heart-trouble will pull him up short. But the merest tyro knows that men under sentence from heart-disease have lived their full span. It is the obsession of his mind, the invasion of his nerves by that long-brooding idea, that bothers me. I am inclined to think the odds are he will go mad if he doesn't die."
"Good God, Shepard!" came from his friend's pale lips.
"Isn't that what you were worrying about when I came in? Yes—you needn't answer. You think so, too; and we are not posing as wise men when we arrive at that simple conclusion."
"What on earth are we to do for him?"