tion.

Another disturbing idea now occurred to her. Would Holliday by any
chance mention to the doctor that he had run into her coming out of a
chemist's shop? It did not seem at all likely, and, of course, if her
suspicions were wrong and she was doing the doctor a gross injustice,
then the information would mean nothing at all. Still, if she was not
mistaken...

"Oh, I must be mistaken!" she exclaimed vehemently in the seclusion of
her taxi. "It is utterly absurd! I have made up the whole story out
of whole cloth. In all that household no one but me has a thought of
anything wrong. How ashamed I should be if they knew!"

Still, when on arriving at the house Chalmers opened the door for her,
she could not resist saying to him:

"Chalmers, I ran into Captain Holliday in the town--such a surprise.
He's hurried back to be here for Sir Charles's funeral. He says you
telephoned him yesterday that Sir Charles was sinking very fast."

There was no mistaking the blank look on the old butler's face.

"Me telephone the Captain, miss? Oh, you must have misunderstood him!
I never even knew where he was stopping in Paris, miss."

So it was Lady Clifford herself who had done it! She felt sure on that
point. Not that it meant anything in itself. Yet all the rest of that
day and the next as well Esther found herself watching faces covertly,
most of all the doctor's. In the midst of all the subdued but busy
preparations for the funeral--undertakers coming and going, messengers
with flowers and telegrams, strangers arriving on this errand and
that--she was acutely aware of the heavy, silent man who, without doing
anything in particular, gave her the almost morbid impression of
dominating the scene. As an actual fact he almost effaced himself, but
to her excited fancy he was omnipresent, overpowering. She thought of
him now not so much as a python as in the form of a huge bloated spider
in the middle of an invisible web, spinning, watching, closing in. She
was ready to believe he was always watching her, spying on her
movements, reading her secret thoughts. There were moments when she
had a wild desire to scream aloud, so tense had her nerves become with
the strain put upon them.

Then common sense came to the rescue, she realised the calm normality
of the household life about her and, with an effort, was able to pull
herself together. She had not long to wait, she told herself, before
knowing the truth. Until