Agatha Cheale’s voice rose into a kind of shriek.

The doctor put the lamp down. He took her hand and held it firmly in his.

“Hush!” he exclaimed, kindly and yet authoritatively. “I’m sorry to have given you such a shock, Miss Cheale, but I’m not so surprised as you seem to be. Her heart was in a very bad state. You have nothing to reproach yourself with—you have been wonderfully good and patient with her, poor soul.”

“Can nothing be done?”

She was looking at him with an extraordinary expression of horror and of pleading on her face.

“Nothing,” he answered gravely.

There was a pause; the doctor dropped the hand he had been holding in so firm a clasp.

“Miss Prince’s dish of strawberries killed this poor woman as surely as if she had taken a dose of poison,” he said grimly.

“You will never let Mr. Garlett know that, will you?” she whispered.

He made no answer, and perhaps she saw by his expression that he was telling himself that even the most sensible women are sometimes foolishly sentimental, for a little colour came back into her face.

38“Shall I go down and tell him—or will you?” she asked, in a voice that had suddenly become composed.

38

“I’ll tell him, of course.”

To his relief he saw her eyes become suffused with tears.

“We little thought yesterday morning that this would be the solution of your problem,” he said feelingly.

“It’s a horrible, horrible solution!” she exclaimed violently.

Again Dr. Maclean made no answer, for he did not, could not, agree with her. To his mind, the death of Mrs. Garlett was bound to turn out a blessing, not only to the young woman who had tended her so faithfully, if unlovingly, for over a year, but also to the dead woman’s husband.

Hard cases make bad law; Dr. Maclean was no advocate of easy divorce, but to his mind there was something 

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