“Who are they?” asked Murrel, in a low and (for anyone who knew him) rather menacing voice.

The question was in some sense answered, not by the person to whom it was addressed, but by a deep and rather guttural voice coming up the black well of the staircase, from somebody who was mounting the stairs. The crazy stairs creaked and even shook under him as he mounted, for he was a heavy man, and as he emerged into the half-light from the little window on the landing he seemed to fill up the whole entrance with a bulk of big overcoat and broad shoulders. The face that was thus turned up to the light reminded Murrel for the first moment of something between a walrus and a whale; it was as if some deep-sea monster was rising out of the deeps and turning up its round and pale and fishy face like a moon. When he looked at the man more carefully and less fancifully he saw that the effect came from very fair hair being very closely cropped in contrast with a moustache like a pair of pale tusks, and from the light of the window on the round spectacles.

This was Dr. Gambrel, who spoke perfectly good English, but stumbled on the steep stairs and swore softly in some other speech. Monkey listened intently a moment, and then silently slipped back into the room.

“Why don’t you have a light?” asked the doctor sharply.

“I suppose I’m a lunatic, too?” Miss Hendry replied, “I’m quite ready to be anything my father is supposed to be.”

“Well, well, it’s all very painful,” said the doctor recovering his composure and with it something more like a callous benevolence. “But there’s nothing to be gained by shilly-shallying over it. You’d much better let me see your father at once.”

“Oh, very well,” she replied. “I suppose I shall have to.”

She turned abruptly and opened the door which let them both into the little dingy room where Dr. Hendry was sitting. There was nothing very notable about it except its dinginess; the doctor had been in it before, and the young woman had hardly been out of it for the last five years. It is therefore perhaps a rather remarkable fact that even the doctor looked at it with a vague surprise, the cause of which he was at the moment too fiercely flustered to define especially. As for the young woman, she looked at the room with a stare of stony astonishment.

There was no other door to the room; Dr. Hendry was sitting alone at his table, and Mr. Douglas Murrel had totally disappeared.

Before Dr. Gambrel could remark on the fact or even become fully conscious of it, the unfortunate Hendry had hopped up from his seat and seemed thrown into a flutter of mingled surrender and expostulation which stopped any other line of conversation.

“You will understand,” he said, “that I protest formally against your interpretation of my case. If I could put the facts fully before the scientific world, I should not have the smallest difficulty in showing that the argument is entirely the other way. I admit that, at this moment, the average of our society has, owing to certain optical diseases which–”

Dr. Gambrel had the power of the modern state, which is perhaps greater than that of any state, at least, so far as the departments over which it ranges are concerned. He had the power to invade this house and break up this family and do what he liked with this member of it; but even he had not the power to stop him talking. In spite of all official efforts, Dr. Hendry’s lecture on Colour-Blindness went on for a considerable time. It continued while the more responsible doctor edged him gradually towards the door, while he led him down the stairs, and at least until he managed to drag him out on to the doorstep. But meanwhile other things had been happening, which were not noticed by those who were listening (however unwillingly) to the lecture which had begun in the room upstairs.

The cabman perched upon the ancient cab was a patient character and had need to be. He had been waiting outside the house of the Hendrys for some time, when something happened which was certainly more calculated to entertain his leisure than anything that had happened yet.

It consisted of a gentleman apparently falling out of the sky on to the top of the cab, and righting himself with some difficulty in the act of nearly rolling off it. This unexpected visitor, when eventually he came the right way up, revealed to the astonished cabman the face and form of the gentleman with whom he had had a chat recently a little further down the road. A prolonged stare at the newcomer, followed by a prolonged stare at the window just above revealed to the driver that the former had not actually dropped from heaven, but only from the window-sill. But though the incident was not by definition a miracle, it was certainly something of a marvel. Those privileged to see Murrel fall off the window-sill on to the top of the hansom cab might have formed a theory about why he had originally been called Monkey.

The cabman was still more surprised when his new companion smiled across at him in an agreeable manner and said, like one resuming a conversation: “As I was saying–”

It is unnecessary to go back after all these years, and the adventurous consequences they brought forth, to record what he was saying. But it is of some direct importance to the story to record what he said. After a few friendly flourishes he sat himself down firmly with his legs astraddle on the top of the cab, and took out his pocket book. He leaned across at the considerable peril of pitching over, and said, confidentially: “Look here, old fellow, I want to buy your cab.”

Murrel was not entirely unacquainted with the scientific regulation, under which was being enacted the last act of the tragedy of Hendry’s Illumination Colours. He remembered having had an argument a long time ago with Julian Archer who was great on the subject. It was a part of that quality in Julian Archer which fitted him so specially and supremely to be a public man. He could become suddenly and quite sincerely hot on any subject, so long as it was the subject filling the newspapers at the moment. If the King of Albania (whose private life, alas, leaves so much to be desired) were at that moment on bad terms with the sixth German princess who had married into his family, Mr. Julian Archer was instantly transformed into a knight-errant ready to cross Europe on her behalf, without any reference to the other five princesses who were not for the moment in the public eye. The type and the individual will be completely misunderstood, however, if we suppose that there was anything obviously unctuous or pharisaical in his way of urging these mutable enthusiasms. In each case in turn, Archer’s handsome and heated face had always been thrust across the table with the same air of uncontrollable protest and gushing indignation. And Murrel would sit up opposite him and reflect that this was what made a public man; the power of being excited at the same moment as the public press. He would also reflect that he himself was a hopelessly private man. He always felt like a private man, though his family and friends had considerable power in the state; but he never felt so hopelessly and almost pitiably private as when he thus remained like one small frozen object, still moist and chilly in the blast of a furnace.

“You can’t be against it; nobody can be against it,” Archer had cried. “It’s simply a Bill to introduce a little more humanity into asylums.”

“I know it is,” his friend had replied, with some gloom. “It introduces a lot more humanity into asylums. That’s exactly what it does do. You’ll hardly believe it, but there’s quite a lot of humanity still that doesn’t want to be introduced into asylums.” But he recalled the story chiefly because Archer and the newspapers had congratulated each other on another new feature rather relevant to the present case. This was the greater privacy of the proceedings. A special sort of magistrate would settle all such cases in an interview as private as a visit to a physician.