attorney that
Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.

"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."

"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."

We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered
the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug,
lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.

CHAPTER XXIII

If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows,
it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken
little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she
scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and
snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole
fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon
straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy
and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and
speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she
fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are
written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.

We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to Northlands. It
was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct foresaw madness if we
took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her father's house, her natural
refuge, was equally impossible. For what explanation could we have given
to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors
to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of
diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy;
which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:

"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to go. I
can't ask father--and I can't go back home. It would drive me mad."

Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
flat--haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable Presence,
the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented country
bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To save her
reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the
chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew.
Fur