k, sir, is of serious consequence to you and
to me," she said. "Listen with your closest attention. When the woman
calling herself Miss Garth came to see us in Vauxhall Walk, I knelt down
behind the chair in which she was sitting and I cut a morsel of stuff
from the dress she wore, which might help me to know that dress if I
ever saw it again. I did this while the woman's whole attention was
absorbed in talking to you. The morsel of stuff has been kept in my
pocketbook from that time to this. See for yourself, Mr. Noel, if it
fits the gap in that dress which your own hands have just taken from
your wife's wardrobe."

She rose and handed him the fragment of stuff across the bed. He put it
into the vacant space in the flounce as well as his trembling fingers
would let him.

"Does it fit, sir?" asked Mrs. Lecount.

The dress dropped from his hands, and the deadly bluish pallor--which
every doctor who attended him had warned his housekeeper to
dread--overspread his face slowly. Mrs. Lecount had not reckoned on
such an answer to her question as she now saw in his cheeks. She hurried
round to him, with the smelling-bottle in her hand. He dropped to his
knees and caught at her dress with the grasp of a drowning man. "Save
me!" he gasped, in a hoarse, breathless whisper. "Oh, Lecount, save me!"

"I promise to save you," said Mrs. Lecount; "I am here with the means
and the resolution to save you. Come away from this place--come nearer
to the air." She raised him as she spoke, and led him across the room
to the window. "Do you feel the chill pain again on your left side?" she
asked, with the first signs of alarm that she had shown yet. "Has your
wife got any eau-de-cologne, any sal-volatile in her room? Don't exhaust
yourself by speaking--point to the place!"

He pointed to a little triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood
fixed high in a corner of the room. Mrs. Lecount tried the door: it was
locked.

As she made that discovery, she saw his head sink back gradually on the
easy-chair in which she had placed him. The warning of the doctors in
past years--"If you ever let him faint, you let him die"--recurred to
her memory as if it had been spoken the day before. She looked at the
cupboard again. In a recess under it lay some ends of cord, placed there
apparently for purposes of packing. Without an instant's hesitation, she
snatched up a morsel of cord, tied one end fast round the knob of
the cupboard door, and seiz