Page:The Death-Doctor.djvu/19

Rh the infernal scribble away—much good will it do."

"Farewell!" said Tom dramatically, and the next I heard about the advertisement, three days later, was a letter forwarded to my lodgings from the Telegraph office, asking me to call at a house in Redcliffe Gardens on the following afternoon.

In the interim I had refused my mother's offer to go home for a while, and had sorted out my goods and chattels, many of which I sold at a great loss, as was but natural.

In the event of the advertisement being a failure I had decided to try my luck in America. However, here was a possibility. I looked at the letter a second and third time—expensive paper, with a faint perfume about it; faint, but very distinctive. It is a curious fact, but one never forgets a smell in the way one loses a name, or a face. The nose is the most reliable of organs. It cannot forget, but always recognizes any odour out of the common which has once been smelt; and this perfume, even to the present day, brings back to me the memory of my bare, untidy lodgings off Tottenham Court Road on that last day of my freedom from serious and worldly affairs.