I have been ROBBED!" "YOU robbed! You, Hemlock Jones, the Terror of Peculators!" I gasped in amazement, arising and gripping the table as I faced him.
"Yes! Listen.

I would confess it to no other.

But YOU who have followed my career, who know my methods; you, for whom I have partly lifted the veil that conceals my plans from ordinary humanity,--you, who have for years rapturously accepted my confidences, passionately admired my inductions and inferences, placed yourself at my beck and call, become my slave, groveled at my feet, given up your practice except those few unremunerative and rapidly decreasing patients to whom, in moments of abstraction over MY problems, you have administered strychnine for quinine and arsenic for Epsom salts; you, who have sacrificed anything and everybody to me,--YOU I make my confidant!" I arose and embraced him warmly, yet he was already so engrossed in thought that at the same moment he mechanically placed his hand upon his watch chain as if to consult the time.

"Sit down," he said.

"Have a cigar ?" "I have given up cigar smoking," I said.
"Why ?" he asked.
I hesitated, and perhaps colored.