One fortune-teller, a woman, small, faded, commonplace-looking, yet with something sinister about her that impressed her patrons uncomfortably, had told Enid Crofton, with a curious smile, that she would have yet another husband, making the third.  This had startled her very much, for the woman, who did not even know her name, could only have guessed that she had been married twice.  Enid Crofton was not given to making unnecessary confidences.  With the exception of her sister-in-law, none of the people who now knew her were aware that Colonel Crofton had been her second husband.

She lay down again, and in the now dying firelight, fixed her eyes on the chintz square of the window curtain nearest to her.  She shut her eyes, but, as always happens, there remained a square luminous patch on their retinas.  And then, all at once, it was as if she saw, depicted on the white, faintly illuminated space, a scene which might have figured in one of those cinema-plays to which she and her house-mate, during those happy days when she had lived in London, used so often to go with one or other of their temporary admirers.

On the white, luminous background two pretty little hands were moving about, a little uncertainly, over a window-ledge on which stood a row of medicine bottles.  Then, suddenly the two pretty hands became engaged in doing something which is done by woman’s hands every day—­the pouring of a liquid from one bottle into another.

Enid Crofton did not visualise the owner of the hands.  She had no wish to do so, but she did see the hands.

Then there started out before her, with astonishing vividness, another little scene—­this time with a man as central figure.  He was whistling; that she knew, though she could not hear the whistling.  It was owing to that surprised, long-drawn-out whistling sound that the owner of the pretty hands had become suddenly, affrightedly, aware that someone was there, outside the window, staring down, and so of course seeing the task on which the two pretty little hands were engaged.

Now, the owner of that pair of now shaking little hands had felt quite sure that no one could possibly see what they were engaged in doing—­for the window on the ledge of which the medicine bottles were standing looked out on what was practically a blank wall.  But the man whose long, surprised whistle had so suddenly scared her, happened at that moment to be sitting astride the top of the blank wall, engaged in the legitimate occupation of sticking bits of broken bottles into putty.  The man was Piper, and doubtless the trifling incident had long since slipped his mind, for that same afternoon his master, Colonel Crofton, had committed suicide in a fit of depression owing to shell shock.

Enid Crofton opened her eyes wide, and the sort of vision, or nightmare—­call it what you will—­faded at once.

It was a nightmare she had constantly experienced during the first few nights which had succeeded her husband’s death.  But since the inquest she had no longer been haunted by that scene—­the double scene of the hands, the pretty little hands, engaged in that simple, almost mechanical, action of pouring the contents of one bottle into another, and the vision of the man on the wall looking down, slantwise, through the window, and uttering that queer, long-drawn-out whistle of utter surprise.