spite of himself.

“I don’t suppose I could have done any good if I had come an hour ago,” he said soothingly. “I take it she overate herself last night?”

“She did indeed—that’s what upset her, of course.”

As he moved toward the now open door he told himself, not for the first time, that it was strange that Agatha Cheale, in this one matter of diet, seemed powerless to control his patient. But there it was! Like so many people with delicate digestions, Mrs. Garlett had always had a fanciful, queer, greedy kind of appetite. Sometimes she would eat hardly anything for days together, and then she would grossly overeat herself.

“I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that you’ve given her brandy?”

“Yes, I have—but it hasn’t done her any good.”

Agatha Cheale still spoke in an agitated, almost hysterical, whisper.

And then, for no particular reason, though he remembered doing so afterwards, Dr. Maclean asked Agatha Cheale a casual question: “Has her husband seen her?”

“No, he thought it best to go off at once for you.”

At last, together, they walked through into the sick woman’s room.

Mrs. Garlett’s bedchamber was the largest in the house, and, like the drawing room below, was somewhat overcrowded with heavy early Victorian mahogany furniture.

Coming out of the brightly lit corridor Dr. Maclean, for a moment, saw nothing, for the one electric lamp which was 36turned on was heavily shaded. But for the fact that he knew where every chair and table stood, he would have knocked into something.

36

“Do turn on another light,” he whispered rather crossly. “I can’t see at all!”

Obediently she turned on the two naked lights hanging above the dressing-table, but the big curtained four-post bed in which the sick woman lay remained in deep shadow.

“Before I see her, tell me exactly what she ate last night,” said the doctor in a low voice.

Standing opposite Dr. Maclean, just under the two bright naked lights, Agatha Cheale, her face pale and strained, told her story.

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