“Pardon me, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount, “I think your father would have waited until he had got something more for the police to do than we have got for them yet.  We shall see this lady again, sir.  Perhaps she will come here next time with her own face and her own voice.  I am curious to see what her own face is like.  I am curious to know whether what I have heard of her voice in a passion is enough to make me recognize her voice when she is calm.  I possess a little memorial of her visit of which she is not aware, and she will not escape me so easily as she thinks.  If it turns out a useful memorial, you shall know what it is.  If not, I will abstain from troubling you on so trifling a subject.—­Allow me to remind you, sir, of the letter under your hand.  You have not looked at it yet.”

Noel Vanstone opened the letter.  He started as his eye fell on the first lines—­hesitated—­and then hurriedly read it through.  The paper dropped from his hand, and he sank back in his chair.  Mrs. Lecount sprang to her feet with the alacrity of a young woman and picked up the letter.

“What has happened, sir?” she asked.  Her face altered as she put the question, and her large black eyes hardened fiercely, in genuine astonishment and alarm.

“Send for the police,” exclaimed her master.  “Lecount, I insist on being protected.  Send for the police!”

“May I read the letter, sir?”

He feebly waved his hand.  Mrs. Lecount read the letter attentively, and put it aside on the table, without a word, when she had done.

“Have you nothing to say to me?” asked Noel Vanstone, staring at his housekeeper in blank dismay.  “Lecount, I’m to be robbed!  The scoundrel who wrote that letter knows all about it, and won’t tell me anything unless I pay him.  I’m to be robbed!  Here’s property on this table worth thousands of pounds—­property that can never be replaced—­property that all the crowned heads in Europe could not produce if they tried.  Lock me in, Lecount, and send for the police!”

Instead of sending for the police, Mrs. Lecount took a large green paper fan from the chimney-piece, and seated herself opposite her master.

“You are agitated, Mr. Noel,” she said, “you are heated.  Let me cool you.”

With her face as hard as ever—­with less tenderness of look and manner than most women would have shown if they had been rescuing a half-drowned fly from a milk-jug—­she silently and patiently fanned him for five minutes or more.  No practiced eye observing the peculiar bluish pallor of his complexion, and the marked difficulty with which he drew his breath, could have failed to perceive that the great organ of life was in this man, what the housekeeper had stated it to be, too weak for the function which it was called on to perform.  The heart labored over its work as if it had been the heart of a worn-out old man.

“Are you relieved, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount.  “Can you think a little?  Can you exercise your better judgment?”