your breath. You will get this prescription
made up in two bottles; take the first before you go to bed to-night, and
the second if you wake with an attack before five in the morning. You say
you are staying the night with friends; better give me the name and let me
see if they're on the telephone before you go. I want you to go to bed
early, tell them not to call you in the morning, and come back to me the
moment you've had your breakfast."

They parted amicably after all, and Pocket went off only wondering whether
he ought to have said positively that he was staying with friends when he
might be going back to school. But Dr. Bompas had been so short with him
at first as to discourage unnecessary explanations; besides, there could
be no question of his going back that night. And the difficulty of the
morning, which he had quite forgotten in the train, was not allowed to mar
a moment of his day in town.

The time-table of that boy's day must speak for itself. It was already
one o'clock, and he was naturally hungry, especially after the way his
breakfast had been spoilt by Coverley's card. At 1.15 he was munching a
sausage roll and sipping chocolate at a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street.
The sausage roll, like the cup of chocolate, was soon followed by another;
and a big Bath bun completed a debauch of which Dr. Bompas would
undoubtedly have disapproved.

At 1.45, from the top of an Atlas omnibus in Baker Street, he espied a
placard with "Collapse of Middlesex" in appalling capitals. And at the
station he got down to learn the worst before going on to Lord's for
nothing.

The worst was so hopelessly bad that Pocket wished himself nearer the
theatres, and then it was that the terra-cotta pile of Madame Tussaud's
thrust itself seductively upon his vision. He had not been there for
years. He had often wanted to go again, and go alone. He remembered
being taken by his sister when a little boy at Coverley's, but she had
refused to go into the Chamber of Horrors, and he had been relieved at the
time but sorry ever afterwards, because so many of the boys of those days
had seen everything and seemed none the worse for the adventure. It was
one of the things he had always wanted not so much to do as to have done.
The very name of the Chamber of Horrors had frozen his infant blood when
he first heard it on the lips of a criminological governess. On the brink
of seventeen there was something of the budding criminologi