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“I am crushed,” said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor’s sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely long and tiresome journey from Shepherd’s Bush to Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being really urgent and coercive–a telegram. This he opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and came round to me in two strides.

“What do you make of that?” he said, and flattened out the wire in front of me.

It ran: “Please come at once. James’ mental state dangerous. Chadd.”

“What does the woman mean?” I said after a pause, irritably. “Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he was born.”

“You are mistaken,” said Grant composedly. “It is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don’t put it in telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.”

“It will force us of course,” I said, smiling.

“Oh, yes,” he replied; “there is a cab-rank near.”

Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.

“I think you will take my word for it, my friend,” he said; “this is one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.”

“I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don’t quite see it,” I said. “Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a spider’s web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?”

“It would not be extraordinary in the least,” answered Basil, with placidity. “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” he repeated, “if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to which I referred.”