come and gone, awful,
untraceable, and in the place of its solemnity reigned silence
absolute.

They looked at each other with scared eyes.

"_As I am a living man that voice was Angela's!_"

This was all he said.

CHAPTER LXVI

Dr. Williamson was a rising young practitioner at Roxham, and what is
more, a gentleman and a doctor of real ability.

On the night that Lady Bellamy took the poison he sat up very late,
till the dawn, in fact, working up his books of reference with a view
to making himself as much the master as possible of the symptoms and
most approved treatment in such cases of insanity as appeared to
resemble Angela Caresfoot's. He had been called in to see her by Mr.
Fraser, and had come away intensely interested from a medical point of
view, and very much puzzled.

At length he shut up his books with a sigh--for, like most books,
though full of generalities, they did not tell him much--and went to
bed. Before he had been asleep very long, however, the surgery bell
was violently rung, and, having dressed himself with the rapidity
characteristic of doctors and schoolboys, he descended to find a
frightened footman waiting outside, from whom he gathered that
something dreadful had happened to Lady Bellamy, who had been found
lying apparently dead upon the floor of her drawing-room. Providing
himself with some powerful restoratives and a portable electric
battery he drove rapidly over to Rewtham House.

Here he found the patient laid upon a sofa in the room where she had
been found, and surrounded by a mob of terrified and half-dressed
servants. At first he thought life was quite extinct, but presently he
fancied that he could detect a faint tremor of the heart. He applied
the most powerful of his restoratives and administered a sharp current
from the battery, and, after a considerable time, was rewarded by
seeing the patient open her eyes--but only to shut them again
immediately. Directing his assistant to continue the treatment, he
tried to elicit some information from the servants as to what had
happened, but all he could gather was that the maid had received a
message not to sit up. This made him suspicious of an attempt at
suicide, and just then his eye fell upon a wineglass that lay upon the
floor, broken at the shank. He took it up; in the bowl there was still
a drop or two of liquid. He smelt it, then dipped his finger in and
tasted it, with the result that h