Again and again she had lived through that awful moment when Varick had pushed her over the edge of the embankment, to roll quickly, softly, inexorably, into the icy-cold water.

She knew he had pushed her over.  To herself it was a fact which did not admit of any doubt at all.  She had seen the mingled hatred and relief which had convulsed his face.  It was with that face she would always see Lionel Varick henceforth.

There had been a moment when she had thought she would tell Dr. Panton; then she had come to the conclusion that there was no good purpose to be served by telling the strange and dreadful truth.

Some noble lines of Swinburne’s which had once been quoted to her by a friend she loved, floated into her mind—­

  “But ye, keep ye on earth
  Your lips from over-speech,
  Loud words and longing are so little worth;
  And the end is hard to reach. 
  For silence after grievous thing’s is good,
  And reverence, and the fear that makes men whole
  And shame, and righteous governance of blood,
  And Lordship of the Soul. 
  And from sharp words and wits men pluck no fruit,
  And gathering thorns they shake the tree at root;
  For words divide and rend,
  But silence is most noble till the end.”

As she lay there, feeling physically so ill and weak, while yet her mind worked so clearly and quickly, she set herself to solve a painful puzzle.  Why had Varick tried to do her to death?  She admitted to herself that she had never liked him, but she had never done him any harm.  And they had been on good terms—­outwardly—­always.

For hours, amid fitful, nightmarish snatches of sleep, and long, lucid intervals of thought, Bubbles had wrestled with the question.

And then, lying there in the early morning, Bubbles suddenly knew.  Varick hated and feared her because she had unwittingly raised his wife from the dead.  And, believing that if he killed her, he would lay that sinister, vengeful, unquiet ghost, he had deliberately planned yesterday’s expedition in order to do that which he had so nearly succeeded in doing.

Bubbles gave an eerie little chuckle which startled herself.  “I’d have haunted him!” she muttered aloud.  “He’d have found it more difficult to get rid of me dead than alive.”

Even as she murmured the words, the door opened, and she heard a voice say, hesitatingly, “Then you’re awake, Bubbles?  Somehow I felt you were awake, and I thought you might like a cup of tea.”

It was Bill Donnington, with a lighted candle in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other.

How glad she was to see him!  How very, very glad!  Yet he only looked his usual sober, unromantic self, standing there at the bottom of her pretty old walnut-wood bed, looking at her with all his wistful, faithful soul in his eyes.

Bill was fully dressed, and Bubbles burst out laughing, feebly.