n, Miss Timson. It all sounds
dreadfully mad."

"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager
confidence.

"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't
bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like,
only--only it isn't true."

Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its
simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant
boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old
houses--the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had
been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched
his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the
unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.

CHAPTER XX

When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he
heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room.
He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the
extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.

"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what
becomes of Personal Immortality?"

Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality
was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian,
which she did effusively.

"Hullo!" he remarked, cheerfully, when her effusion was over. "No Milly
and no tea!"

"We don't want either just yet," returned Lady Thomson. "I'm terribly
anxious about Mildred, Ian, and Miss Timson has not said anything to
make me less so. I want a sound, sensible opinion on the state of
her--her nerves."

Ian's brow clouded.

"Tell me frankly, do you notice so great a difference in her from time
to time, as to account for the positively insane delusion she has got
into her head?"

"What do you mean, Aunt Beatrice?" asked Ian, shortly, sternly eying
Tims, whom he imagined to have let out the secret.

"Mildred has made an extraordinary statement to me about not being the
same person now as she was in March. Of course I see she--well, she is
not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very
different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it
into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how
you could have allowed her to come to that state of--of mental
aberration, without doing anything."

Ian was silent