The yellow glare fell upon her hard, set face, her tightly
compressed lips and black eyebrows. Of a sudden David realised her
strange and wonderful likeness to the dead man. His own bloodless lips
parted, and the room rang with horrid laughter, surely the laughter of a
lunatic.

"Oh, it is a wonderful purpose that," he cried. "To see him hang--hang
by the neck. Bah! What concern of yours, Joan, is it, I wonder?"

"I am his daughter."

"And I his son. And, listen, my sister, here is news for you. It was
no living man at whose door his death lies, but at a woman's. A
woman's, I tell you. You understand? I swear it."

She looked at him doubtfully. Surely he was raving.

"A woman's, David?"

"Ay, a woman's. And there are others too--her victims. Look at me. I
myself am one. Her victim, body and soul corrupt. If one could only
reach her throat."

Even Joan shuddered at the look which seemed to her devilish, Joan,
whose nerves were of iron, and in whom herself the lust for vengeance
was as the cry for blood. Yet this was not possible.

"I think that you are raving," she said. "Did you not know that Douglas
Guest disappeared that night, and was never more heard of--ay, that
there was money missing?"

"Douglas Guest took but his own," he answered. "It is the woman who is
guilty."

She was bewildered.

"Woman, David? Why, there was none who would have harmed a hair of his
head."

Again he laughed, and again she turned pale with the horror of that
unearthly merriment.

"You see but a little way, sister Joan," he said, "and the vengeance you
cry for is in other hands. As for Douglas Guest, leave him alone. He
is as guiltless as you are."

"You have told me so much," she said firmly, "you must tell me more.
How comes it that you know these things?"

He shuddered. His lips moved but she did not catch the sound of words.
He was apparently in a state of collapse. She reached brandy from a
cupboard and forced some between his teeth.

"Be strong, David," she whispered, "and tell me of these things."

He sat up, and with his incoherent words came the birth to her of a new
and horrible suspicion.

"I had to have money," he muttered. "She drove me to it. She turned me
away. I was in rags, an ill-looking object. But I never meant that.
Douglas was before me, and he knows it."

His head fell back, he was unconscious. Joan rang the bell, and sent
the maid for a doctor. Yet when he recovered and learnt what she had