s.

"I confess I don't see why."

"Cigarettes d'Auvergne!"

"Some French rubbish."

"The boy has evidently been dependent on them?"

"It looks like it."

"And this man Bompas made him give them all up?"

"So he has the impudence to say."

"Is it possible you don't see the importance of all this?"

Mr. Upton confessed incompetence unashamed.

"I never heard of these cigarettes before; they're an imported article;
you can't get them everywhere, I'll swear! Your boy has got to rely on
them; he's out of reach of the doctor who's forbidden them; he'll try to
get them somewhere! If he's been trying in London, I'll find out where
before I'm twenty-four hours older!"

"But how can you?" asked Mr. Upton, less impressed with the possibility
than by this rapid if obvious piece of reasoning.

"A. V. M.!" replied Eugene Thrush, with cryptic smile.

"Who on earth is he?"

"Nobody; it's the principle on which I work."

"A. V. M.?"

"Otherwise the old nursery game of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral."

Again Mr. Upton had to prevent himself by main force from declaring it all
no laughing matter; but his silence was almost bellicose.

"You divide things into two," explained Thrush, "and go on so dividing
them until you come down to the indivisible unit which is the answer to
the riddle. Animal or Vegetable? Vegetable or Mineral? Northern or
Southern Hemisphere? Ah! I thought your childhood was not so very much
longer ago than mine."

Mr. Upton had shrugged an impatient recognition of the game.

"In this case it's Chemists Who Do Sell D'Auvergne Cigarettes and Chemists
Who Don't. Then--Chemists Who Do and Did Yesterday, and Chemists Who Do
but Didn't! But we can probably improve on the old game by playing both
rounds at once."

"I confess I don't quite follow," said Mr. Upton, "though there seems some
method in the madness."

"It's all the method I've got," rejoined Thrush frankly. "But you shall
see it working, for unless I'm much mistaken this is Mullins back sooner
than I expected."

Mullins it was, and with the negative information expected and desired,
though the professional melancholy of his countenance might have been the
precursor of the worst possible news. The hospitals on his rapid round
had included Charing Cross, St. Thomas's, St. George's, and the Royal
Free; but he had telephoned besides to St. Mary's and St. Bartholomew's.
At none of these institutions had a young gentleman of the nam