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316 "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