“I can understand that,” Herriard said, with a shade of gloom. “Then Murray was practically a sound man again when I first mentioned him to you?”
“Certainly he was,” Hallamar answered emphatically. “For what seemed, even to me, a really hopeless case, it was an astonishingly quick recovery of power. He was weeks ahead of my hitherto best patient. But then I have never had a patient of his character. Yes; he was cured when you first expressed a wish that I should treat him. And I may say I was much surprised that you, his intimate friend, should have been kept in the dark.”
“He wished, no doubt, to give me an agreeable surprise,” Herriard explained grimly. “As it was, I found out his recovery by a mere accident.”
“Ach, so!” Dr. Hallamar’s strong face wore a look of sagacious curiosity. “It is strange. Yes; I remember he sent me a note desiring me to say nothing about his recovery to you. Ah, a man of singular strength of mind; he was evidently preparing a surprise for his friend. You are his great friend; not?”
The question was put so abruptly, so pointedly, that Herriard was startled into looking up quickly into the other’s face. He felt that Hallamar was trying to read in his eyes the true state of his relationship with Gastineau; and that the result was a confirmed doubt.
“We are scarcely,” he answered, “as friendly as we were once.”
“No?” Hallamar’s manner could not be said to express even a polite regret. “Well, perhaps that may be not altogether a bad thing,” he suggested. “Mr. Murray is too clever for close friendship with most of us. Such towering intellect as his stands better alone.”
With which significant, if equivocal, comment he gave his hand to Herriard and hurried off.
It was on the evening before their departure from Vienna that a strange experience befell them which, for a time at least, brought back their fears. Herriard had taken a box at the old Burg Theatre to see a famous melodramatic piece that had won popularity all over the Continent. At one part of the performance the lights in the auditorium were lowered to enhance the effect of a thrilling scene. Suddenly, as they sat in the darkness, Alexia clutched Herriard’s arm. “Geoffrey!” she exclaimed under her breath.
Under the impression that the blood-curdling business on the stage had affected her, he gave her hand a reassuring clasp, and whispered a few light words making fun of the mimic horrors. But after that first start Alexia had quickly recovered her self-possession. She raised her fan till it half covered her face, while her eyes were directed apprehensively across the house.