ly mistrusted him. I wondered what his passage of arms
with Hilda might mean. Yet, somehow, I was shy of alluding to it before
her.

One thing, however, was clear to me now--this great campaign that was
being waged between the nurse and the Professor had reference to the
case of Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.

For a time, nothing came of it; the routine of the hospital went on as
usual. The patient with the suspected predisposition to aneurism kept
fairly well for a week or two, and then took a sudden turn for the
worse, presenting at times most unwonted symptoms. He died unexpectedly.
Sebastian, who had watched him every hour, regarded the matter as of
prime importance. "I'm glad it happened here," he said, rubbing his
hands. "A grand opportunity. I wanted to catch an instance like this
before that fellow in Paris had time to anticipate me. They're all on
the lookout. Von Strahlendorff, of Vienna, has been waiting for just
such a patient for years. So have I. Now fortune has favoured me. Lucky
for us he died! We shall find out everything."

We held a post-mortem, of course, the condition of the blood being what
we most wished to observe; and the autopsy revealed some unexpected
details. One remarkable feature consisted in a certain undescribed and
impoverished state of the contained bodies which Sebastian, with his
eager zeal for science, desired his students to see and identify.
He said it was likely to throw much light on other ill-understood
conditions of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the peculiar
faint odour of the insane, now so well recognised in all large asylums.
In order to compare this abnormal state with the aspect of the healthy
circulating medium, he proposed to examine a little good living blood
side by side with the morbid specimen under the microscope. Nurse Wade
was in attendance in the laboratory, as usual. The Professor, standing
by the instrument, with one hand on the brass screw, had got the
diseased drop ready arranged for our inspection beforehand, and was
gloating over it himself with scientific enthusiasm. "Grey corpuscles,
you will observe," he said, "almost entirely deficient. Red, poor in
number, and irregular in outline. Plasma, thin. Nuclei, feeble. A state
of body which tells severely against the due rebuilding of the wasted
tissues. Now compare with typical normal specimen." He removed his eye
from the microscope, and wiped a glass slide with a clean cloth as
he spoke. "Nurse Wade