She seated herself near the window.  The wardrobe stood against the wall opposite, and the bed was at the side of the room on her right hand.  “Open the wardrobe, Mr. Noel,” she said.  “I don’t go near it.  I touch nothing in it myself.  Take out the dresses with your own hand and put them on the bed.  Take them out one by one until I tell you to stop.”

He obeyed her.  “I’ll do it as well as I can,” he said.  “My hands are cold, and my head feels half asleep.”

The dresses to be removed were not many, for Magdalen had taken some of them away with her.  After he had put two dresses on the bed, he was obliged to search in the inner recesses of the wardrobe before he could find a third.  When he produced it, Mrs. Lecount made a sign to him to stop.  The end was reached already; he had found the brown Alpaca dress.

“Lay it out on the bed, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount.  “You will see a double flounce running round the bottom of it.  Lift up the outer flounce, and pass the inner one through your fingers, inch by inch.  If you come to a place where there is a morsel of the stuff missing, stop and look up at me.”

He passed the flounce slowly through his fingers for a minute or more, then stopped and looked up.  Mrs. Lecount produced her pocket-book and opened it.

“Every word I now speak, sir, is of serious consequence to you and to me,” she said.  “Listen with your closest attention.  When the woman calling herself Miss Garth came to see us in Vauxhall Walk, I knelt down behind the chair in which she was sitting and I cut a morsel of stuff from the dress she wore, which might help me to know that dress if I ever saw it again.  I did this while the woman’s whole attention was absorbed in talking to you.  The morsel of stuff has been kept in my pocketbook from that time to this.  See for yourself, Mr. Noel, if it fits the gap in that dress which your own hands have just taken from your wife’s wardrobe.”

She rose and handed him the fragment of stuff across the bed.  He put it into the vacant space in the flounce as well as his trembling fingers would let him.

“Does it fit, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount.

The dress dropped from his hands, and the deadly bluish pallor—­which every doctor who attended him had warned his housekeeper to dread—­overspread his face slowly.  Mrs. Lecount had not reckoned on such an answer to her question as she now saw in his cheeks.  She hurried round to him, with the smelling-bottle in her hand.  He dropped to his knees and caught at her dress with the grasp of a drowning man.  “Save me!” he gasped, in a hoarse, breathless whisper.  “Oh, Lecount, save me!”

“I promise to save you,” said Mrs. Lecount; “I am here with the means and the resolution to save you.  Come away from this place—­come nearer to the air.”  She raised him as she spoke, and led him across the room to the window.  “Do you feel the chill pain again on your left side?” she asked, with the first signs of alarm that she had shown yet.  “Has your wife got any eau-de-cologne, any sal-volatile in her room?  Don’t exhaust yourself by speaking—­point to the place!”