“I will go willingly.  But would it not be better to wait—­”

“Then you may never see him at all.”

“Very well; but I wish I had some better news to give.”

“That will come later.  This house was never meant for Carlos.  Hetty, you will stay here.  Miss Strange, let us go now.”

“You need not speak; just let him see you.”

Violet nodded and followed Mrs. Quintard into the sick-room.

The sight which met her eyes tried her young emotions deeply.  Staring at her from the bed, she saw two piercing eyes over whose brilliance death as yet had gained no control.  Clements’s soul was in that gaze; Clement halting at the brink of dissolution to sound the depths behind him for the hope which would make departure easy.  Would he see in her, a mere slip of a girl dressed in fashionable clothes and bearing about her all the marks of social distinction, the sort of person needed for the task upon the success of which depended his darlings’ future?  She could hardly expect it.  Yet as she continued to meet his gaze with all the seriousness the moment demanded, she beheld those burning orbs lose some of their demand and the fingers, which had lain inert upon the bedspread, flutter gently and move as if to draw attention to his wife and the three beautiful children clustered at the foot-board.

He had not spoken nor could she speak, but the solemnity with which she raised her right hand as to a listening Heaven called forth upon his lips what was possibly his last smile, and with the memory of this faint expression of confidence on his part, she left the room, to make her final attempt to solve the mystery of the missing document.

Facing the elderly lady in the hall, she addressed her with the force and soberness of one leading a forlorn hope: 

“I want you to concentrate your mind upon what I have to say to you.  Do you think you can do this?”

“I will try,” replied the poor woman with a backward glance at the door which had just been closed upon her.

“What we want,” said she, “is, as I stated before, an insight into the workings of your brain at the time you took the will from the safe.  Try and follow what I have to say, Mrs. Quintard.  Dreams are no longer regarded by scientists as prophecies of the future or even as spontaneous and irrelevant conditions of thought, but as reflections of a near past, which can almost without exception be traced back to the occurrences which caused them.  Your action with the will had its birth in some previous line of thought afterwards forgotten.  Let us try and find that thought.  Recall, if you can, just what you did or read yesterday.”

Mrs. Quintard looked frightened.

“But, I have no memory,” she objected.  “I forget quickly, so quickly that in order to fulfill my engagements I have to keep a memorandum of every day’s events.  Yesterday? yesterday?  What did I do yesterday?  I went downtown for one thing, but I hardly know where.”