the
prosecutor."

"What! You threaten?"

"No; I do not threaten. Not in words, I mean. My presence here is in
itself a threat, but I make no other. You know now, unfortunately, WHY I
have come. That makes my task harder. But I will NOT give it up. I will
wait and conquer."

Sebastian answered nothing. He strode into the laboratory alone, tall,
grim, unbending, and let himself sink into his easy chair, looking up
with a singular and somewhat sinister smile at his bottles of microbes.
After a minute he stirred the fire, and bent his head forward, brooding.
He held it between his hands, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed
moodily straight before him into the glowing caves of white-hot coal
in the fireplace. That sinister smile still played lambent around the
corners of his grizzled moustaches.

I moved noiselessly towards the door, trying to pass behind him
unnoticed. But, alert as ever, his quick ears detected me. With a sudden
start, he raised his head and glanced round. "What! you here?" he
cried, taken aback. For a second he appeared almost to lose his
self-possession.

"I came for my clinical," I answered, with an unconcerned air. "I have
somehow managed to mislay it in the laboratory."

My carefully casual tone seemed to reassure him. He peered about him
with knit brows. "Cumberledge," he asked at last, in a suspicious voice,
"did you hear that woman?"

"The woman in 93? Delirious?"

"No, no. Nurse Wade?"

"Hear her?" I echoed, I must candidly admit with intent to deceive.
"When she broke the basin?"

His forehead relaxed. "Oh! it is nothing," he muttered, hastily. "A mere
point of discipline. She spoke to me just now, and I thought her tone
unbecoming in a subordinate.... Like Korah and his crew, she takes too
much upon her.... We must get rid of her, Cumberledge; we must get rid
of her. She is a dangerous woman!"

"She is the most intelligent nurse we have ever had in the place, sir,"
I objected, stoutly.

He nodded his head twice. "Intelligent--je vous l'accorde; but
dangerous--dangerous!"

Then he turned to his papers, sorting them out one by one with a
preoccupied face and twitching fingers. I recognised that he desired to
be left alone, so I quitted the laboratory.

I cannot quite say WHY, but ever since Hilda Wade first came to
Nathaniel's my enthusiasm for Sebastian had been cooling continuously.
Admiring his greatness still, I had doubts as to his goodness. That day
I felt I positive