om here altogether, but
her husband seems quite indifferent."

"Do you think she will recover?"

"It is impossible to say."

"How do you think the shock was caused?"

"I should not like to hazard an opinion on that point, either," replied
Dr. Ravenshaw gravely. He glanced at his watch as he spoke. "I must be
going," he said.

They left the house together, but branched off at the gate--Dr. Ravenshaw
to visit a fisherman's dying wife, and Barrant to seek the _Three Jolly
Wreckers_ for supper before returning to Penzance.

From the kitchen window Thalassa watched them go: the doctor walking
across the cliffs with resolute stride, the detective making for the path
over the moors with bent head and slower step, as though his feet were
clogged by the weight of his thoughts. Thalassa watched their dwindling
forms until they disappeared, and then stood still, in a listening
attitude. The sound of the lawyer stirring in the study overhead seemed to
rouse him from his immobility. He closed the door, and stood looking up
the staircase with the shadow of indecision on his face.

CHAPTER XXII

Upstairs Mr. Brimsdown made unavailing search among Robert Turold's papers
for proofs of his statement about his marriage. The lawyer believed that
they existed, and his failure to find them brought with it a belated
realization of the fact that he, too, had been cherishing hopes of
Sisily's innocence. It was the memory of her face which had inspired that
secret hope. That was not sentiment (so Mr. Brimsdown thought), but the
worldly wisdom of a man whose profession had trained him to read the human
face. Sisily's face, as he recalled it now, had looked sad and a little
fearful that night at Paddington, but there was nothing furtive or tainted
in her clear glance. He felt that a judge would look with marked attention
at such a face in the dock. Judges, like lawyers, and all whose business
it is to trip their kind into the gins of the law, scan faces as closely
as evidence in the effort to read the stories written there.

But the disappearance of certain papers which had probably been abstracted
from that room weighed more in the scale of suspicion against Sisily than
her look of innocence. She stood to gain most by the suppression or
destruction of the proofs of her mother's earlier marriage. But Mr.
Brimsdown could not see that this rather negative inference against the
girl brought the actual solution of the mystery any nea