"I wonder how long he has taken it, and if his mind is affected yet?"
The lady returned very soon, and seeing her in the bright light, with her hat off, I noticed that her eyes were swollen and red. She had been crying.
"Will you come up, doctor? I'll show you the way," she said. So I followed her promptly.
Lying on a couch at the foot of a single bed, in a comparatively small room, was a man in a dressing-gown, his face purple and bloated, his breathing slow, heavy and stertorous. This, combined with thin feeble pulse, the condition of the pupils, and the insensitive eye-balls, told me that his wife was correct—he was suffering from poison. Was it what I had been told?
Ideas pass through one's mind swiftly under such circumstances—particularly so, perhaps, in mine—and I kept on wondering. She had told me they quarrelled. The man, as I had seen him before in the street, and as I saw him now, comatose and half dead, gave me the impression of being a brute. Dissipation was written large in his fat face, and I could well understand him being cruel, and repulsive also, to such a woman as this—his wife. Had
