A long time elapsed before she was able to read in her mother’s confused utterances anything to which she could attach a meaning.  At last Mrs. Dinneford spoke out again, and with an abruptness that startled her: 

“Not another dollar, sir!  Remember, you don’t hold all the winning cards!”

Edith held her breath, and sat motionless.  Her mother muttered and mumbled incoherently for a while, and then said, sharply,

“I said I would ruin him, and I’ve done it!”

“Ruin who?” asked Edith, in a repressed voice.

This question, instead of eliciting an answer, as Edith had hoped, brought her mother back to semi-consciousness.  She rose again in bed, and looked at her daughter in the same frightened way she had done a little while before, then laid herself over on the pillows again.  Her lips were tightly shut.

Edith was almost wild with suspense.  The clue to that sad and painful mystery which was absorbing her life seemed almost in her grasp.  A word from those closely-shut lips, and she would have certainty for uncertainty.  But she waited and waited until she grew faint, and still the lips kept silent.

But after a while Mrs. Dinneford grew uneasy, and began talking.  She moved her head from side to side, threw her arms about restlessly and appeared greatly disturbed.

“Not dead, Mrs. Bray?” she cried out, at last, in a clear, strong voice.

Edith became fixed as a statue once more.

A few moments, and Mrs. Dinneford added,

“No, no!  I won’t have her coming after me.  More money!  You’re a vampire!”

Then she muttered, and writhed and distorted her face like one in some desperate struggle.  Edith shuddered as she stood over her.

After this wild paroxysm Mrs. Dinneford grew more quiet, and seemed to sleep.  Edith remained sitting by the bedside, her thoughts intent on the strange sentences that had fallen from her Mother’s lips.  What mystery lay behind them?  Of what secret were they an obscure revelation?  “Not dead!” Who not dead?  And again, “It’s dead!  You know that; and the woman’s dead, too.”  Then it was plain that she had heard aright the name of the person who had called on her mother, and about whom her mother had made a mystery.  It was Bray; if not, why the anxiety to make her believe it Gray?  And this woman had been her nurse.  It was plain, also, that money was being paid for keeping secret.  What secret?  Then a life had been ruined.  “I said I would ruin him, and I’ve done it!” Who? who could her mother mean but the unhappy man she had once called husband, now a criminal in the eyes of the law, and only saved by insanity from a criminal’s cell?

Putting all together, Edith’s mind quickly wrought out a theory, and this soon settled into a conviction—­a conviction so close to fact that all the chief elements were true.