a garden like Mr. Millicent’s I should take him. It seems to me now that she was afraid of what would happen if she said anything else.”

“Yes, sir, that fits in perfectly.”

Derrick got up and relit his pipe. “Then, I think we might let the matter rest there for a while, and I won’t trouble you any further this morning. If it is decided to do anything later on, it will all be done through you, as I do not wish to appear in the thing at all.”

“Very good, sir, and if I can help, which I’d like to, I’ll go as far as my duties permit, and maybe”—here the sergeant grinned meaningly—“a bit further.” He pointed to the jade god. “Had I better keep this thing here?”

Derrick shook his head, picked up the image gingerly, and slipped it in his pocket.

“No, thanks, I want to use it for a while. By the way, do you know whether I can get a couple of pounds of green wax in Bamberley?”

Jean Millicent’s unpremeditated visit to Beech Lodge had marked a turning-point in the long, gray months that followed her father’s death. The violence and brutality of this had shocked her beyond words, while to her sense of loss was added the numbing knowledge that on the very threshold of life she had been confronted with the worst that life had to exhibit. Millicent himself had had no surviving relations; her mother’s people, after the first horrified sympathy, did not allow the matter to burden them further; and, as the girl impulsively told Derrick, she felt tremendously alone.

Between mother and daughter there was complete love—and a limited understanding. The real link had been with Millicent, from whom Jean inherited the subjective side of her nature. She had a profound belief in mysterious influences, incapable of analysis, but controlling nevertheless the world of unseen things. She realized that she moved among these, swaying unconsciously to their faint pressure, the recipient of distant and unmistakable signals that flicked over the horizon of existence. She had never talked much about this with her father. His own belief had of late been too burdened with an apprehension she never fathomed. But she understood where her mother often failed to understand, silently completing the sentences he sometimes left unfinished, putting her mind parallel with his, and building up a queer unexplainable union that expressed itself not so much in speech as in those fleeting glances of comprehension that are more eloquent than any words.

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