ing to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. "Paul Hollister
is dead!" he cried.

"I read the papers," said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring.

"The damn fool!" cried the doctor, his face working. "Just now! There's
another child expected."

Rankin's inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the
hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery
had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor's success
in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. "You
can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient,"
he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the
doctor into it. "Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you
happen to be up so early? It's hardly daylight."

"Up! You don't suppose I've been to bed! Lydia--" His voice halted.

Rankin's quiet face stirred. "She feels it--terribly?"

"I can't make her out! I can't make her out!" The doctor flung this
confession of failure before him excitedly. "I don't know what's in her
mind, but she's evidently dangerously near--women in her condition
never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden
shock--they _telephoned_ it--and there was nobody there but that fool
Flora--"

"Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?" asked Rankin
squarely.

"I don't know! I don't know, I tell you! She says strange
things--strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was
holding Ariadne--you knew, didn't you? that she called their little girl
Ariadne--?"

Rankin sat down, white to the lips. "No," he said, "I didn't know that.
I never heard anything about--about her married life."

"Well, she was holding Ariadne as close as though she was expecting
kidnapers. I came in and she looked up--God! Rankin, with what a face of
fear! It wasn't grief. It was terror! She said: 'I must save the
children--I mustn't let it get the children, too.' I asked her what she
meant, and she went on in a whisper that fairly turned the blood
backward in my veins, 'The Minotaur! He got Paul--I must hide the
children from him!' And that's all she would say. I managed to put
Ariadne to bed, though Lydia screamed at the idea of having her out of
her sight, and I gave Lydia a bromide and made her lie down. I think she
knew me--oh, yes, I'm sure she did--why, she seemed like herself in
every way but that one--but all night long she has wake