oods for me.
The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you, as you shall see."

Enid Crofton sat up in bed. She felt suddenly afraid--horribly,
desperately afraid. As is often the case with those who have drifted away
from any form of religion, she was very superstitious, and terrified of
evil omens. During the War she had been fond of going first to one and
then to another of the fashionable sooth-sayers.

They had all agreed as to one thing--this was that her husband would die,
and of course she had thought he would be killed at the Front. But he had
come through safe and sound, and more--more _hateful_ than ever.

One fortune-teller, a woman, small, faded, commonplace-looking, yet with
something sinister about her that impressed her patrons uncomfortably,
had told Enid Crofton, with a curious smile, that she would have yet
another husband, making the third. This had startled her very much, for
the woman, who did not even know her name, could only have guessed that
she had been married twice. Enid Crofton was not given to making
unnecessary confidences. With the exception of her sister-in-law, none of
the people who now knew her were aware that Colonel Crofton had been her
second husband.

She lay down again, and in the now dying firelight, fixed her eyes on the
chintz square of the window curtain nearest to her. She shut her eyes,
but, as always happens, there remained a square luminous patch on their
retinas. And then, all at once, it was as if she saw, depicted on the
white, faintly illuminated space, a scene which might have figured in one
of those cinema-plays to which she and her house-mate, during those happy
days when she had lived in London, used so often to go with one or other
of their temporary admirers.

On the white, luminous background two pretty little hands were moving
about, a little uncertainly, over a window-ledge on which stood a row of
medicine bottles. Then, suddenly the two pretty hands became engaged in
doing something which is done by woman's hands every day--the pouring of
a liquid from one bottle into another.

Enid Crofton did not visualise the owner of the hands. She had no wish to
do so, but she did see the hands.

Then there started out before her, with astonishing vividness, another
little scene--this time with a man as central figure. He was whistling;
that she knew, though she could not hear the whistling. It was owing to
that surprised, long-drawn-out whistling s