It clung round her neck, recalling biblical
pictures of the head of John the Baptist, and the frame-work had to be
sawn through before she could get it off. As to the story about his
having been caught by Mrs. Dawson's aunt kissing the housemaid behind
the waterbutt, that, as the Doctor admits, is a bit of bad luck that
might have happened to anyone. But whether there was really any
evidence connecting him with Dolly Calthorpe's unaccountable missing of
the last train home, is of course, a more serious matter. Mrs. Dawson,
a handsome, high-spirited woman herself, may have found Dawson, as
originally fashioned, trying to the nerves; though even then the
question arises: Why have married him? But there is a difference, as
Mrs. Dawson has pointed out, between a husband who hasn't enough of the
natural man in him and a husband who has a deal too much. It is
difficult to regulate these matters.

Altogether, and taking an outside estimate, the Doctor's opinion is
that there may have been half a dozen, who, with Malvina's assistance,
succeeded in hypnotising themselves into temporary insanity. When
Malvina, a little disappointed, but yielding quite sweetly her own
judgment to that of the wise and learned Christopher, consented to
"restore" them, the explanation was that, having spent their burst of
ill-acquired energy, they fell back at the first suggestion to their
former selves.

Mrs. Arlington does not agree with the Doctor. She had been trying to
reform herself for quite a long time and had miserably failed. There
was something about them--it might almost be described as an
aroma--that prompted her that evening to take the twins into her
confidence; a sort of intuition that in some way they could help her.
It remained with her all the next day; and when the twins returned in
the evening, in company with the postman, she knew instinctively that
they had been about her business. It was this same intuitive desire
that drew her to the Downs. She is confident she would have taken that
walk to the Cross Stones even if the twins had not proposed it.
Indeed, according to her own account, she was not aware that the twins
had accompanied her. There was something about the stones; a sense as
of a presence. She knew when she reached them that she had arrived at
the appointed place; and when there appeared to her--coming from where
she could not tell--a diminutive figure that seemed in some mysterious
way as if it were cl