ting
himself at his table, he looked at me through his glasses with those
keen penetrating eyes that age had not dimmed or time dulled.

"I heard voices," I admitted, "that was all." The circumstance was a
strange one, and those words were so ominous that I was determined not
to reveal to him the conversation I had overheard.

"Like many other women patients suffering from brain troubles, she has
taken a violent dislike to me, and believes that I'm the very devil in
human form," he said, smiling. "Fortunately, she had a friend with
her, or she might have attacked me tooth and nail just now," and
leaning back in his chair he laughed at the idea--laughed so lightly
that my suspicions were almost disarmed.

But not quite. Had you been in my place you would have had your
curiosity and suspicion aroused to no mean degree--not only by the
words uttered by the woman and Sir Bernard's defiant reply, but also
by the fact that the female voice sounded familiar.

A man knows the voice of his love above all. The voice that I had
heard in that adjoining room was, to the best of my belief, that of
Ethelwynn.

With a resolution to probe this mystery slowly, and without unseemly
haste, I dropped the subject, and commenced to ask his advice
regarding the complicated case of Lady Twickenham. The history of it,
and the directions he gave can serve no purpose if written here;
therefore suffice it to say that I remained to dinner and caught the
nine o'clock express back to London.

While at dinner, a meal served in that severe style which
characterised the austere old man's daily life, I commenced to talk of
the antics of insane persons and their extraordinary antipathies, but
quickly discerned that he had neither intention nor desire to speak of
them. He replied in those snappy monosyllables which told me plainly
that the subject was distasteful to him, and when I bade him good-bye
and drove to the station I was more puzzled than ever by his strange
behaviour. He was eccentric, it was true; but I knew all his little
odd ways, the eccentricity of genius, and could plainly see that his
recent indisposition, which had prevented him from attending at Harley
Street, was due to nerves rather than to a chill.

The trains from Brighton to London on Sunday evenings are always
crowded, mainly by business people compelled to return to town in
readiness for the toil of the coming week. Week-end trippers and day
excursionists fill the compartm