o assume an
entirely new force, and a strange suspicion began to creep over me.

I have said that one of the most remarkable features of Sir John's
illness was his deadly pallor. Though I had now spent some time at
Worth, and had been daily struck by this lack of colour, I had never
before remembered in this connection that a strange paleness had also
been an attribute of Adrian Temple, and was indeed very clearly marked
in the picture painted of him by Battoni. In Sir John's account,
moreover, of the vision which he thought he had seen in his rooms at
Oxford, he had always spoken of the white and waxen face of his spectral
visitant. The family tradition of Royston said that Temple had lost his
colour in some deadly magical experiment, and a conviction now flashed
upon me that Jocelyn's face "as white as snow" could refer only to this
same unnatural pallor, and that he too had been smitten with it as with
the mark of the beast.

In a drawer of my despatch-box, I kept by me all the letters which the
late Lady Maltravers had written home during her ill-fated honeymoon.
Miss Maltravers had placed them in my hands in order that I might be
acquainted with every fact that could at all elucidate the progress of
Sir John's malady. I remembered that in one of these letters mention was
made of a sharp attack of fever in Naples, and of her noticing in him
for the first time this singular pallor. I found the letter again
without difficulty and read it with a new light. Every line breathed of
surprise and alarm. Lady Maltravers feared that her husband was very
seriously ill. On the Wednesday, two days before she wrote, he had
suffered all day from a strange restlessness, which had increased after
they had retired in the evening. He could not sleep and had dressed
again, saying he would walk a little in the night air to compose
himself. He had not returned till near six in the morning, and then
seemed so exhausted that he had since been confined to his bed. He was
terribly pale, and the doctors feared he had been attacked by some
strange fever.

The date of the letter was the 25th of October, fixing the night of the
23d as the time of Sir John's first attack. The coincidence of the date
with that of the day missing in Temple's diary was significant, but it
was not needed now to convince me that Sir John's ruin was due to
something that occurred on that fatal night at Naples.

The question that Dr. Frobisher had asked Miss Maltrav