“Ah,” commented Phillip; “that doesn’t sound encouraging. Must be costing a lot of money, too. I fancy my brother and Maggie Purcell are both beginning to wish they had taken your advice and relied on the letter by itself. But Jack was overborne by Barnby’s insistence on corroborative evidence, and Maggie let him decide. And now they are sorry they listened to Barnby. They hadn’t bargained for all this delay.”
“Barnby was quite right as to the value of the additional evidence,” said Thorndyke. “What he didn’t grasp was the very great difficulty of getting it. But I think I hear the big-wigs approaching.”
As he spoke, the usher threw open the lecturer’s door. The audience stood up, the president entered, preceded by the mace-bearer and followed by the officers and the lecturer, and took his seat; the audience sat down and the lecture began without further formalities.
The theatre was nearly full. It usually was when Professor D’Arcy lectured; for that genial savant had the magnetic gift of infusing his own enthusiasm into the lecture, and so into his audience, even when, as on this occasion, his subject lay on the outside edge of medical science. To-day he was lecturing on the epidermic appendages of the marine worms, and from the opening sentence he held his audience as by a spell, standing before the great blackboard with a bunch of coloured chalks in either hand, talking with easy eloquence—mostly over his shoulder—while he covered the black surface with those delightful drawings that added so much to the charm of his lectures. Phillip watched his flying fingers with fascination and struggled frantically to copy the diagrams into a large note-book with the aid of a handful of coloured pencils, while Thorndyke, not much addicted to note-taking, listened and watched with concentrated attention, mentally docketing and pigeon-holing any new or significant fact in what was to him a fairly familiar subject.
The latter part of the lecture dealt with those beautiful sea-worms that build themselves tubes to live in—worms like the Serpula that make their shelly or stony tubes by secretion from their own bodies, or like the Sabella or Terebella, build them up with sand-grains, little stones or fragments of shell. Each, in turn, appeared in lively portraiture on the blackboard and the trays on the table were full of specimens which were exhibited by the lecturer and which the audience were invited to inspect more closely after the lecture.
Accordingly, when the last words of the peroration had been pronounced, the occupants of the benches trouped down into the arena to look at the exhibits and seek further details from the genial professor. Thorndyke and Phillip held back for a while on the outskirts of the crowd, but the professor had seen them on their bench and now approached, greeting them with a hearty handshake and a facetious question.
“What are you doing here, Thorndyke? Is it possible that there are medico-legal possibilities even in a marine worm?”
“Oh, come, D’Arcy!” protested Thorndyke, “don’t make me such a hidebound specialist. May I have no rational interests in life? Must I live forever in the witness-box like a marine worm in its tube?”
“I suspect you don’t get very far out of your tube,” said the professor with a chuckle and a sly glance at Phillip.
“I got far enough out last summer,” retorted Thorndyke, “to come and aid and abet you in your worm-hunting. Have you forgotten Cornwall?”