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“No, sir. He will allow no one but myself to enter his laboratory. And, injured as he is, I could not induce him to quit it.”

“Indeed! He is engaged in some great research, perhaps? I have known such cases.”

We were passing under a lamp-post, and the woman suddenly turned and glared at me with a look of such wild terror that for an instant I involuntarily glanced round me under the impression that some terrible peril, unseen by me, was menacing us both.

“Don’t–don’t ask me any questions,” she said breathlessly. “He will tell you all. But do, oh, do hasten! Good God! he may be dead by this time!”

I made no reply, but allowed her to grasp my hand, which she did with a bony, nervous clutch, and endeavored with some difficulty to keep pace with the long strides–I might well call them bounds, for they seemed the springs of a wild animal rather than the paces of a young girl–with which she covered the ground. Not a word more was uttered until we stopped before a shabby, old-fashioned tenement house in the Seventh Avenue, not far above Twenty-third Street. She pushed the door open with a convulsive pressure, and, still retaining hold of my hand, literally dragged me upstairs to what seemed to be a back offshoot from the main building, as high, perhaps, as the fourth story. In a moment more I found myself in a moderate-sized chamber, lit by a single lamp. In one corner, stretched motionless on a wretched pallet bed, I beheld what I supposed to be the figure of my patient.

“He is there,” said the girl; “go to him. See if he is dead–I dare not look.”

I made my way as well as I could through the numberless dilapidated chemical instruments with which the room was littered. A French chafing dish supported on an iron tripod had been overturned, and was lying across the floor, while the charcoal, still warm, was scattered around in various directions. Crucibles, alembics, and retorts were confusedly piled in various corners, and on a small table I saw distributed in separate bottles a number of mineral and metallic substances, which I recognized as antimony, mercury, plumbago, arsenic, borax, etc. It was veritably the apartment of a poor chemist. All the apparatus had the air of being second-hand. There was no luster of exquisitely annealed glass and highly polished metals, such as dazzles one in the laboratory of the prosperous analyst. The makeshifts of poverty were everywhere visible. The crucibles were broken, or gallipots were used instead of crucibles. The colored tests were not in the usual transparent vials, but were placed in ordinary black bottles. There is nothing more melancholy than to behold science or art in distress. A threadbare scholar, a tattered book, or a battered violin is a mute appeal to our sympathy.

I approached the wretched pallet bed on which the victim of chemistry was lying. He breathed heavily, and had his head turned toward the wall. I lifted his arm gently to arouse his attention. “How goes it, my poor friend?” I asked him. “Where are you hurt?”

In a moment, as if startled by the sound of my voice, he sprang up in his bed, and cowered against the wall like a wild animal driven to bay. “Who are you? I don’t know you. Who brought you here? You are a stranger. How dare you come into my private rooms to spy upon me?”

And as he uttered this rapidly with a frightful nervous energy, I beheld a pale distorted face, draped with long gray hair, glaring at me with a mingled expression of fury and terror.

“I am no spy,” I answered mildly. “I heard that you had met with an accident, and have come to cure you. I am Dr. Luxor, and here is my card.”

The old man took the card, and scanned it eagerly. “You are a physician?” he inquired distrustfully.

“And surgeon also.”

“You are bound by oath not to reveal the secrets of your patients.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I am afraid that I am hurt,” he continued faintly, half sinking back in the bed.