ding over his work, sleeping in his chair, or in his bed. Yet
behind these pictures was another image that started through their lines
and colours dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead
man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle
yielded to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there.

The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room writing-table.
The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed back.... Signs of his
recent presence were visible. The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes
of burned papers; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close
air.

She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and
case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed,
was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham
Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in
an orderly pile.

She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed
it, and put it in her breast. There was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval
shape. She wondered what it might be? As she did so, she looked at the
letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the cover in the
small, firm hand:

"'To the Coroner.' ... Merciful God!..."

The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room rang with it as she
turned and ran. With the nightmare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of
feeling nothing tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty
that of all those crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in
the racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look at was the
real, true picture of Saxham now.

Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the
dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey
landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up.
In the company of Little Miss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and
Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his
throat?

But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept in. Pale dawn
peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds assured her of that. Where
might she find him? Where seek him?

Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to such a question!
Where has he gone night after night? Coward, you knew, and yet avoided!...
What threshold has he crossed when the world was slee