c or anything
queer, whatever that man wanted to make you believe. I am really
frightfully normal."

"Yes, thank God! I feel an ass to think I could ever have doubted it."

"I don't know. When I think what I must have looked like bursting in
on you that night--a sort of Curfew-Shall-Not-Ring-To-night, I
suppose--I don't wonder at anyone's thinking me a lunatic. How I ever
got there at all is a mystery to me. I believe I was unconscious part
of the time. I scarcely remember it; the whole thing seems like a sort
of feverish nightmare. When the taxi came to a standstill I simply
gave everything up for lost. I only set out to walk that last mile in
a sort of dogged desperation; I never thought I should get there, or
that if I did it would be in time. It was all uphill, too. I remember
the perspiration running in trickles with the rain down my face, all in
my eyes, so that I could scarcely see. Every little while I just
toppled over altogether and lay on the sidewalk. It was the purest
good luck that I wasn't run in for a drunken person. That would have
finished it!"

"My dear!"

"Oh, well, let's not talk about it any more. I want to forget all that
part of it--if I can."

He sat down close to her on the window-seat, silent for a moment. Then
he said:

"Esther, tell me one thing. What first put the suspicion into your
head that there was something not quite straight about my father's
illness?"

She knit her brow and thought hard for a bit.

"I hardly know," she replied at last. "It's awfully difficult to say.
There were certain tiny, unimportant things that I noticed, even before
I took on the case, but taken separately not one would have meant
anything much. I don't believe I can say exactly when I first began to
feel uncomfortable about the situation. Perhaps I shouldn't have done
so at all if it hadn't been for the pure accident of overhearing a
conversation between your stepmother and Captain Holliday that
afternoon I told you about."

"I know you saw them together, but you never told me you heard what
they were talking about."

"Well, I did hear quite a lot. I listened hard, pretending not to, of
course. I got tremendously interested. He was saying he had almost
made up his mind to go to South America with his Spanish friend, and
she showed very plainly that she was afraid to let him go, that she
believed he wouldn't come back to her. Then she made it pretty clear
that it was the at