“Hartley thinks something may have been put in my wine.”

“What for?” the doctor asked.  “What had these people to gain by drugging you?  Suppose for some far-fetched reason they wanted to have Silas Blackburn put out of the way.  They couldn’t make you do it by drugging you.  At any rate, they couldn’t have had a hand in this afternoon.  Mind, I’m not saying you had a thing to do with it yourself, but I don’t believe you were drugged.  Any drug likely to be used in wine would probably have sent you into a deep sleep.  And your symptoms on waking up are scarcely sharp enough.  Sorry, boy.  Sounds more like aphasia.  The path you’ve been treading sometimes leads to that black country, and it’s there that hates sharpen unknown.  I remember a case where a tramp returned and killed a farmer who had refused him food.  Retained no recollection of the crime—­hours dropped out of his life.  They executed him while he still tried to remember.”

“I read something about the case,” Bobby muttered.

“Been better if you hadn’t,” the doctor grumbled.  “Suggestions work in a man’s brain without his knowing it.”

He thought for a moment, his heavy, black brows coming closer together.  He glanced at the windows of the old room.  His sunken, infused eyes nearly closed.

“I know how you feel, and that’s a little punishment maybe you deserve.  I’ll say this for your comfort.  You probably followed the plan that had been impressed on your brain by Mr. Graham.  You came here, no doubt, and stood around.  With an automatic appreciation of your condition you may have taken that old precaution of convivial men returning home, and removed your shoes.  Then your automatic judgment may have warned you that you weren’t fit to go in at all, and you probably wandered off to the empty house.”

“Then,” Bobby asked, “you don’t think I did it?”

“God knows who did it.  God knows what did it.  The longer I live the surer I become that we scientists can’t probe everything.  Whenever I go near Silas Blackburn’s body I receive a very powerful impression that his death in that room from such a wound goes deeper than ordinary murder, deeper than a case of recurrent aphasia.”

His eyes widened.  He turned with Graham and Bobby at the sound of an automobile coming through the woods.

“Probably the coroner at last,” he said.

The automobile, a small runabout, drew up at the entrance to the court.  A little wizened man, with yellowish skin stretched across high cheek bones, stepped out and walked up the path.

“Well!” he said shrilly.  “What you doing, Doctor Groom?”

“Waiting to witness another reason why coroners should be abolished,” the doctor rumbled.  “This is the dead man’s grandson, Coroner; and Mr. Graham, a friend of the family’s.”

Bobby accepted the coroner’s hand with distaste.

“Howells,” the coroner said in his squeaky voice, “seems to think it’s a queer case.  Inconvenient, I call it.  Wish people wouldn’t die queerly whenever I go on a little holiday.  I had got five ducks, gentlemen, when they came to me with that damned telegram.  Bad business mine, ’cause people will die when you least expect them to.  Let’s go see what Howells has got on his mind.  Bright sleuth, Howells!  Ought to be in New York.”