quite close, and I'll take you there." She spoke with the
peculiar drawl and dropped her "h's" in the manner of the true
London-bred girl.

"I'll come if you'll wait a minute," I said, and then, leaving her
outside, I entered the house and obtained my thermometer and
stethoscope.

When I rejoined her and closed the door I made some inquiries about
the sufferer's symptoms, but the description she gave me was so
utterly vague and contradictory that I could make nothing out of it.
Her muddled idea of his illness I put down to her fear and anxiety for
his welfare.

She had no mother, she told me; and her father had, of late, given way
just a little to drink. He "used" the Haycock, in Edgware Road; and
she feared that he had fallen among a hard-drinking set. He was a
pianoforte-maker, and had been employed at Brinsmead's for eighteen
years. Since her mother died, six years ago, however, he had never
been the same.

"It was then that he took to drink?" I hazarded.

"Yes," she responded. "He was devoted to her. They never had a wry
word."

"What has he been complaining of? Pains in the head--or what?"

"Oh, he's seemed thoroughly out of sorts," she answered after some
slight hesitation, which struck me as peculiar. She was greatly
agitated regarding his illness, yet she could not describe one single
symptom clearly. The only direct statement she made was that her
father had certainly not been drinking on the previous night, for he
had remained indoors ever since he came home from the works, as
usual, at seven o'clock.

As she led me along the Marylebone Road, in the same direction as
that I had just traversed--which somewhat astonished me--I glanced
surreptitiously at her, just at the moment when we were approaching
a street lamp, and saw to my surprise that she was a sad-faced girl
whose features were familiar. I recognised her in a moment as the girl
who had been my fellow passenger from Brighton on that Sunday night.
Her hair, however, was dishevelled, as though she had turned out from
her bed in too great alarm to think of tidying it. I was rather
surprised, but did not claim acquaintance with her. She led me
past Madame Tussaud's, around Baker Street Station, and then into
the maze of those small cross-streets that lie between Upper Baker
Street and Lisson Grove until she stopped before a small, rather
respectable-looking house, half-way along a short side-street,
entering with a latch-key.

In the narrow h