not with advantage be treated as ordinary maladies and some passions
are--with the aid of drugs. Perhaps some day it will be. Certainly it
soon will be if the eugenists get their way.

And, thinking of the letter I had just read, which now lay folded in my
pocket, my memory drifted backward. For since the day I had met Jack
Osborne at Brooks's on his return from Nigeria, many incidents had
occurred which puzzled me. Trifling incidents individually, no doubt,
yet significant when considered in the concrete. There was the incident,
for instance, of Sir Harry Dawson's declaring in a letter written to
Lord Easterton from the Riviera that he had never met Gastrell, never
heard of him even, though Lord Easterton had Gastrell's assurance that
he knew Sir Harry Dawson and had intended to call upon him on the
evening he had unwittingly entered Lord Easterton's house, which was
next door.

Then there was something not quite normal in Gastrell's posing one day
as a married man, the next as a bachelor; also in his pretending at one
moment that he had never seen Osborne and myself before, yet admitting
at the next that he had met us. True, he had advanced an apparently
sound reason for this _volte-face_ of his, but still--

The affair, too, in Maresfield Gardens. That surely was an "incident"
which bordered on a mystery. I felt I should never forget our
extraordinary reception that night--the "black out" house, as stage
managers say; our repeated ringing the door bell; the slow unlocking and
unbolting the door; the cautious inquiry; our wait in the darkness after
our admission; the discovery of that horrible serpent with its chilling
eyes; the locked door; the sudden entry of Gastrell, and his odd
conversation.