Then, like a half-awakened sleeper released from the horror of a
nightmare, she sank back in her previous listless attitude, and fell to
muttering again.

As Barrant watched her, Thalassa watched them both with an anxiety which
would have aroused Barrant's suspicions if he had seen it. But Thalassa's
face was again closely guarded when he did look up.

"You'll get neither rhyme nor reason out of her," said Thalassa, as their
glances met.

"I'll try once more," murmured Barrant, almost to himself. He turned to
her again, but this time he did not lay his hand on her arm. "Mrs.
Thalassa"--he spoke more gently--"will you try and understand me?"

"Red on black ... black on red." Her hands moved restlessly.

In a sudden recognition of the futility of trying to gather anything from
that clouded brain, Barrant turned abruptly away without another word. And
the black gaze of Thalassa followed him through the door and out into the
darkness of the night.

CHAPTER XVII

The bell in the darkened chambers rang with the insistent clamour of
mechanism responding with blind obedience to a human hand, but Mr. Anthony
Brimsdown suffered it to pass unnoticed. As an elderly bachelor, living
alone, he was sufficiently master of his own affairs to disregard the
arrival of the last post, leaving the letters as they were tumbled through
the slit in the door downstairs until he felt inclined to go and get them.

He was standing in the centre of the room examining an unusual trinket--a
gold hoop like a bracelet, with numbers and the zodiac signs engraved on
the inner surface. Mr. Brimsdown had discovered it in a Kingsway curiosity
shop a week before. It was a portable sun-dial of the sixteenth century. A
slide, pushed back a certain distance in accordance with the zodiac signs,
permitted the sun to fall through a slit on the figures of the hours
within--a dainty timekeeper for mediaeval lovers. Mr. Brimsdown was no
gallant, nor had he sufficient imagination to prompt him to wonder what
dead girl's dainty fingers had once held up the bright fragile circle to
the sun to see if Love's tryst was to be kept. His joy in the sun-dial was
the pride of the collector in the possession of a rare thing.

But that night it failed to interest him. He put it down with a sigh, and
resumed his restless pacing of the room.

It was his office, but he preferred it to his chambers at the end of the
passage. He said the air was better, but it is dou