ow about her sister's death?"

"She'd give anything to be able to believe it, but she's a hard woman,
and brooding along certain lines makes one groovy. I have sometimes been
afraid of her reason--on the religious side, don't you know. Elizabeth
doesn't matter. Brain of a hen. Always had."

Here Arthurs summoned me to the bath-chair, and the ravaged face,
beneath its knitted Shetland wool hood, of Miss Mary Moultrie.

"I need not remind you, I hope, of the seal of secrecy--absolute
secrecy--in your profession," she began. "Thanks to my cousin's and my
sister's stupidity, you have found out," she blew her nose.

"Please don't excite her, sir," said Arthurs at the back.

"But, my dear Miss Moultrie, I only know what I've seen, of course,
but it seems to me that what you thought was a tragedy in your sister's
case, turns out, on your own evidence, so to speak, to have been an
accident--a dreadfully sad one--but absolutely an accident."

"Do you believe that too?" she cried. "Or are you only saying it to
comfort me?"

"I believe it from the bottom of my heart. Come down to Holmescroft for
an hour--for half an hour and satisfy yourself."

"Of what? You don't understand. I see the house every day-every night.
I am always there in spirit--waking or sleeping. I couldn't face it in
reality."

"But you must," I said. "If you go there in the spirit the greater need
for you to go there in the flesh. Go to your sister's room once more,
and see the window--I nearly fell out of it myself. It's--it's awfully
low and dangerous. That would convince you," I pleaded.

"Yet Aggie had slept in that room for years," she interrupted.

"You've slept in your room here for a long time, haven't you? But you
nearly fell out of the window when you were choking."

"That is true. That is one thing true," she nodded. "And I might have
been killed as--perhaps Aggie was killed."

"In that case your own sister and cousin and maid would have said you
had committed suicide, Miss Moultrie. Come down to Holmescroft, and go
over the place just once."

"You are lying," she said quite quietly. "You don't want me to come down
to see a window. It is something else. I warn you we are Evangelicals.
We don't believe in prayers for the dead. 'As the tree falls--'"

"Yes. I daresay. But you persist in thinking that your sister committed
suicide--"

"No! No! I have always prayed that I might have misjudged her."

Arthurs at the bath-chair spoke up: "