anced up at her hostess with a piercing dart of the keen
brown eyes, held her wine-glass half raised, and then electrified me by
uttering, in the same low voice, audible to me alone, but quite clearly
and unhesitatingly, these astounding words:

"I think, before twelve mouths are out, MR. LE GEYT WILL HAVE MURDERED
HER!"

For a minute I could not answer, so startling was the effect of this
confident prediction. One does not expect to be told such things at
lunch, over the port and peaches, about one's dearest friends, beside
their own mahogany. And the assured air of unfaltering conviction with
which Hilda Wade said it to a complete stranger took my breath away.
WHY did she think so at all? And IF she thought so why choose ME as the
recipient of her singular confidences?

I gasped and wondered.

"What makes you fancy anything so unlikely?" I asked aside at last,
behind the babel of voices. "You quite alarm me."

She rolled a mouthful of apricot ice reflectively on her tongue, and
then murmured, in a similar aside, "Don't ask me now. Some other time
will, do. But I mean what I say. Believe me; I do not speak at random."

She was quite right, of course. To continue would have been equally rude
and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and
wait till my sibyl was in the mood for interpreting.

After lunch we adjourned to the drawing-room. Almost at once, Hilda Wade
flitted up with her brisk step to the corner where I was sitting. "Oh,
Dr. Cumberledge," she began, as if nothing odd had occurred before, "I
WAS so glad to meet you and have a chance of talking to you, because I
DO so want to get a nurse's place at St. Nathaniel's."

"A nurse's place!" I exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress
of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much
of a butterfly for such serious work. "Do you really mean it; or are
you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a
Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I
can tell you, is not all crimped cap and becoming uniform."

"I know that," she answered, growing grave. "I ought to know it. I am a
nurse already at St. George's Hospital."

"You are a nurse! And at St. George's! Yet you want to change to
Nathaniel's? Why? St. George's is in a much nicer part of London, and
the patients there come on an average from a much better class than ours
in Smithfield."

"I know that too