Now although, in the light of her apparent affection for her aged husband, she ought, one would have thought, to be exceedingly happy over this, it was distinctly noticeable that she was nervous and ill at ease, that there was a hunted look in her eyes, and that, as the day wore on, these things seemed to be accentuated.  More than that, there seemed added proof of the truth of young Bawdrey’s assertion that she and Captain Travers were in league with each other, for that day they were constantly together, constantly getting off into out-of-the-way places, and constantly talking in an undertone of something that seemed to worry them.

Even when dinner was over, and the whole party adjourned to the drawing-room for coffee, and the lady ought, in all conscience, to have given herself wholly up to the entertainment of her guests it was observable that she devoted most of her time to whispered confidences with Captain Travers, that they kept going to the window and looking up at the sky, as if worried and annoyed that the twilight should be so long in fading and the night in coming on.  But worse than this, at ten o’clock Captain Travers made an excuse of having letters to write, and left the room, and it was scarcely six minutes later that she followed suit.

But the Captain had not gone to write letters, as it had happened.  Instead, he had gone straight to the morning-room, an apartment immediately behind that in which the elder Mr. Bawdrey’s collection was housed, and from which a broad French window opened out upon the grounds, and it might have caused a scandal had it been known that Mrs. Bawdrey joined him there one minute after leaving the drawing-room.

“It is the time, Walter, it is the time!” she said, in a breathless sort of way, as she closed the door and moved across the room to where he stood, a dimly seen figure in the dim light.  “God help and pity me! but I am so nervous, I hardly know how to contain myself.  The note said at ten to-night in the morning-room, and it is ten now.  The hour is here, Walter, the hour is here!”

“So is the man, Mrs. Bawdrey,” answered a low voice from the outer darkness; then a figure lifted itself above the screening shrubs just beyond the ledge of the open window, and Cleek stepped into the room.

She gave a little hysterical cry and reached out her hands to him.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you, even though you hint at such awful things, I am so glad, so glad!” she said.  “I almost died when I read your note.  To think that it is murder—­murder!  And but for you he might be dead even now.  You will like to know that the doctor brought the stuff you sent by him—­brought it at once—­and my darling is better—­better.”

Before Cleek could venture any reply to this, Captain Travers stalked across the room and gripped his hand.

“And so you are that great man Cleek, are you?” he said.  “Bully boy!  Bully boy!  And to think that all the time it wasn’t some mysterious natural affliction; to think that it was crime—­murder—­poison.  What poison, man, what poison—­what?”