"Indeed?" The doctor stepped back from the doors, and motioned his visitor into the consultation room.

Woodhouse stepped into a large room lighted by a single green-shaded reading lamp, which threw a white circle of light straight down upon a litter of thin-bladed scalpels in a glass dish of disinfectant on a table. The shadowy outlines of an operating chair, of high-shouldered bookcases, and the dull glint of instruments in a long glass case were almost imperceptible because of the centering of all light upon the glass dish of knives. Doctor Koch dragged a chair out from the shadows, and, carelessly enough, placed it in the area of radiance; he motioned Woodhouse to sit. The physician leaned carelessly against an arm of the operating chair; his face was in the shadow save where reflected light shone from his glasses, giving them the aspect of detached eyes.

"So, a friend--a friend in Berlin told you to consult me, eh? Berlin is a long way from Kamleh--especially in these times. Greater physicians than I live in Berlin. Why--"

"My friend in Berlin told me you were the only physician who could help me in my peculiar trouble." Imperceptibly the accenting of the aspirants in Woodhouse's speech grew more marked; his voice took on a throaty character. "By some specialists my life even has been set to end in a certain year, so sure is fate for those afflicted like myself."

"So? What year is it, then, you die?" Doctor Koch's strangely detached eyes--those eyes of glass glowing dimly in the shadow--seemed to flicker palely with a light all their own. Captain Woodhouse, sitting under the white spray of the shaded incandescent, looked up carelessly to meet the stare.

"Why, they give me plenty of time to enjoy myself," he answered, with a light laugh. "They say in 1932--"

"Nineteen thirty-two!" Doctor Koch stepped lightly to the closed folding doors, trundled them back an inch to assure himself nobody was in the waiting-room, then closed and locked them. He did similarly by a hidden door on the opposite side of the room, which Woodhouse had not seen. After that he pulled a chair close to his visitor and sat down, his knees almost touching the other's. He spoke very low, in German:

"If your trouble is so serious that you will die--in 1932, I must, of course, examine you for--symptoms."

For half a minute the two men looked fixedly at each other. Woodhouse's right hand went slowly to the big green scarab stuck in his cravat. He pulled the pin out, turned it over in his fingers, and by pressure caused the scarab to pop out of the gold-backed setting holding it. The bit of green stone lay in the palm of his left hand, its back exposed. In the hollowed back of the beetle was a small square of paper, folded minutely. This Woodhouse removed, unfolded and passed to the physician. The latter seized it avidly, holding it close to his spectacled eyes, and then spreading it against the light as if to read a secret water mark. A smile struggled through the jungle of his beard. He found Woodhouse's hand and grasped it warmly.

"Your symptom tallies with my diagnosis. Nineteen Thirty-two," he began rapidly. "Five days ago we heard from--the Wilhelmstrasse--you would come. We have expected you each day, now. Already we have got word through to our friends at Gibraltar of the plan; they are waiting for you."

"Good!" Woodhouse commented. He was busy refolding the thin slip of paper that had been his talisman, and fitting it into the back of the scarab. "Woodhouse--he is already at the Hotel Khedive; saw his name on the register when I landed from the Castle this morning." Now the captain was talking in familiar German.