The colour receded from her face.  She was so surprised that she hardly knew what to answer.

“I don’t think so.  My first experience of a really disagreeable kind was when that boy’s terrier flew at me.  It’s true that I’ve always had a peculiar dislike to dogs—­at least for a long time,” she corrected herself hastily.  She added after a moment’s pause, “I expect you know that Colonel Crofton bred dogs?”

“Aye, and that very dog, Flick, was bred by your husband—­isn’t that so?”

“I believe he was.”

She was wondering anxiously why he asked her this question, and her mind all at once flew off to Piper and Mrs. Piper, and she felt sick with fear.

“I ask you these questions,” said the doctor very deliberately, “because, according to Mrs. Tosswill, Timmy thinks, or says he thinks, that you are always accompanied by—­well, how can I put it?—­by a phantom dog.”

“A phantom dog?”

She stared at him with her large dark eyes, and then, all at once, she remembered Dandy, her husband’s terrier, who, after his master’s tragic death, had refused all food, and had howled so long and so dismally that, in a fit of temper, she had herself ordered him to be destroyed.

She lay back on her pretty, frilled pillow, and covered her face with the hand belonging to the arm that was uninjured.

“Oh,” she gasped out, “I see now.  What a horrible idea!”

“Then you have no painful associations with any one particular terrier apart from Flick?” persisted Dr. O’Farrell.

He really wanted to know.  According to his theory, Timmy’s subconscious self could in some utterly inexplicable way build up an image of what was in the minds of those about him.

“Perhaps I have,” she confessed in a very low voice.  “My husband had a favourite terrier called Dandy, Flick’s father in fact.  The poor brute got into such a state after his master’s death that he had to be sent to one of those lethal chambers in London.  The whole thing was a great trouble, and a great pain to me.”

Dr. O’Farrell felt a thrill of exultation run through him.  To find his theory thus miraculously confirmed was very gratifying.

“That’s most interesting!” he exclaimed, “for Timmy, even the very first time he saw you walking down the avenue towards the front door of Old Place, thought you were followed by a dog uncommonly like his terrier, Flick.  His theory seemed to be that both Flick and the cat did not fly at you, but at your invisible companion.”

“My invisible companion?”

He saw the colour again receding from her face.  “Don’t for a moment believe I think there is any phantom dog there,” he said soothingly.  “All I believe—­and what you have told me confirmed my theory—­is that Timmy Tosswill can not only see what’s in your subconscious mind, but that he can build up a kind of image of it and produce what is called, I believe, in the East, collective hypnotism.  I should never be surprised, for instance, if someone else thought they saw you with a dog—­that is as long as that boy was present.  It’s a most interesting and curious case.”