ss." There was nothing but contentment and rest in her voice; but
then some of the tranquillity may have been due to exhaustion.

Adrian made the mistake of saying:--"And all the while you thought your
sister dead."

He felt a thrill in her hand as it tightened on his, and heard it in her
voice. "Oh, could it have been?" she said. "But I was told so--in a
letter."

It was useless for Adrian to affect ignorance of the story; and, indeed,
that would have made matters worse, for it would have put it on her to
attempt the retelling of it.

Perhaps he did his best to say:--"Lady Gwendolen has told me the whole
story. So I know. Don't think about it!... Well--that's nonsense! One
can't help thinking. I mean--think as little as possible!" It did not
mend matters much.

Her mind had got back to the letter, and could not leave it. "I have to
think of it," she said, "because it was my husband that wrote that
letter. I know why he wrote it. It was not himself. It was a devil. It
came out of Roomoro the black witch-doctor and got a place inside my
husband. _He_ did not write that letter to Phoebe. _It_ wrote it. For
see how it had learned all the story when Roomoro sucked the little
scorpion's poison out of Mary Ann Stennis's arm!"

To Adrian all this was half-feverish wandering; the limited delirium of
extreme weakness. No doubt these were real persons--Roomoro and Mary Ann
Stennis. It was their drama that was fictitious. He saw one thing
plainly. It was to be humoured, not reasoned with. So whatever was the
cause of a slight start and disconcertment of his manner when she
stopped to ask suddenly:--"But you do not believe in devils,
perhaps?"--it was not the one she had ascribed it to. In fact he was
quite ready with a semi-conscientious affirmative. "Indeed I do. Tell me
exactly how you suppose it happened, again. Roomoro was a native
conjurer or medicine-man, I suppose?"

Then old Maisie recapitulated the tale her imagination had constructed
to whitewash the husband who had ruined her whole life, adding some
details, not without an interest for students of folklore, about the
devil that had come from Roomoro. She connected it with the fact that
Roomoro had eaten the flesh of the little black Dasyurus, christened the
"Native Devil" by the first Tasmanian colonists, from the excessive
shortness of its temper. The soul of this devil had been driven from the
witch-doctor by the poison of the scorpion, and had made for the ne