nstant in her
safety-pin raid for the answer:

"I've been feeling the heat. It's nothing. You go down, and I'll
come."

"Have some eau-de-Cologne?" But, alas! there was no eau-de-Cologne.

"Never mind. You go down, and I'll follow. I shall be all right
after a cup of tea." And Sally, after an intricate movement with a
safety-pin, an openwork lace cuff that has lost a button, and a white
wrist, goes down three accelerandos of stair-lengths, with landing
pauses, and ends with a dining-room door staccato. But she isn't long
gone, for in two minutes the door reopens, and she comes upstairs as
fast, nearly, as she went down. In her hand she carries, visibly,
Johann Maria Farina.

"Where on earth did you find that?" says her mother.

"The man had it. Wasn't it funny? He heard me say to Dr. Vereker that
I was so sorry I'd not been able to eau-de-Cologne your forehead, and
he began speaking and couldn't get his words. Then he got this out of
his pocket. I remember one of the men at the station said something
about his having a bottle, but I thought he meant a pocket-flask. He
looks the sort of man that would have a pocket-flask and earrings."

Her mother doesn't seem to find this inexplicable, nor to need
comment. Rather the contrary. Sally dabs her brow with eau-de-Cologne,
beneficially, for she seems better, and says now go; she won't be
above a couple of minutes. Nor is she, in the sense in which her
statement has been accepted, for she comes downstairs within seven by
the clock with the dutiful ratchet movement.

* * * * *

When she came within hearing of those in the room below, she heard
a male voice that was not Dr. Vereker's. Yes, the man (whom we still
cannot speak of by a name) was saying something--slowly, perhaps--but
fairly articulately and intelligibly. She went very deliberately, and
listened in the doorway. She looked very pale, and very interested--a
face of fixed attention, of absorption in something she was irresolute
about, rather than of doubt about what she heard; an expression rather
out of proportion to the concurrent facts, as we know them.

"What is so strange"--this is what the man was saying, in his slow
way--"is that I could find words to tell you, if I could remember what
it is I have to tell. But when I try to bring it back, my head fails.
Tell me again, mademoiselle, about the railway-carriage." Sally
wondered why she was mademoiselle, but recognised a to