“Only yesterday,” he wrote, “I had a return of what you, my dear friend, call ‘the delusion of the voice.’  The nearer the hour of your dinner approaches, the more keenly I fear that the same thing may happen in your house.  Pity me, and forgive me.”

Even good-natured Lord Loring felt some difficulty in pitying and forgiving, when he read these lines.  “This sort of caprice might be excusable in a woman,” he thought.  “A man ought really to be capable of exercising some self-control.  Poor Stella!  And what will my wife say?”

He walked up and down the library, with Stella’s disappointment and Lady Loring’s indignation prophetically present in his mind.  There was, however, no help for it—­he must accept his responsibility, and be the bearer of the bad news.

He was on the point of leaving the library, when a visitor appeared.  The visitor was no less a person than Romayne himself.  “Have I arrived before my letter?” he asked eagerly.

Lord Loring showed him the letter.

“Throw it into the fire,” he said, “and let me try to excuse myself for having written it.  You remember the happier days when you used to call me the creature of impulse?  An impulse produced that letter.  Another impulse brings me here to disown it.  I can only explain my strange conduct by asking you to help me at the outset.  Will you carry your memory back to the day of the medical consultation on my case?  I want you to correct me, if I inadvertently misrepresent my advisers.  Two of them were physicians.  The third, and last, was a surgeon, a personal friend of yours; and he, as well as I recollect, told you how the consultation ended?”

“Quite right, Romayne—­so far.”

“The first of the two physicians,” Romayne proceeded, “declared my case to be entirely attributable to nervous derangement, and to be curable by purely medical means.  I speak ignorantly; but, in plain English, that, I believe, was the substance of what he said?”

“The substance of what he said,” Lord Loring replied, “and the substance of his prescriptions—­which, I think, you afterward tore up?”

“If you have no faith in a prescription,” said Romayne, “that is, in my opinion, the best use to which you can put it.  When it came to the turn of the second physician, he differed with the first, as absolutely as one man can differ with another.  The third medical authority, your friend the surgeon, took a middle course, and brought the consultation to an end by combining the first physician’s view and the second physician’s view, and mingling the two opposite forms of treatment in one harmonious result?”

Lord Loring remarked that this was not a very respectful way of describing the conclusion of the medical proceedings.  That it was the conclusion, however, he could not honestly deny.

“As long as I am right,” said Romayne, “nothing else appears to be of much importance.  As I told you at the time, the second physician appeared to me to be the only one of the three authorities who really understood my case.  Do you mind giving me, in few words, your own impression of what he said?”