“Excuse me, sir,” interrupted the voice of the young man who had been left in the hall, “the lady is listening to what you say.  She is still at the head of the stairs.”

“She is, is she!” cried Fenton, sharply, his admiration for the fascinating stranger having oozed out at his companion’s rebuff.  “I will soon show her—­” But the words melted into thin air as he reached the door.  The young girl had disappeared, and only a faint perfume remained in the place where she had stood.

“A most extraordinary person,” grumbled the constable, turning back, but stopping again as a faint murmur came up from below.

“The gentleman is waking,” called up a voice whose lack of music was quite perceptible at a distance.

With a bound Mr. Fenton descended the stairs, followed by Mr. Sutherland.

Miss Page stood before the door of the room in which sat Philemon Webb.  As they reached her side, she made a little bow that was half mocking, half deprecatory, and slipped from the house.  An almost unbearable sensation of incongruity vanished with her, and Mr. Sutherland, for one, breathed like a man relieved.

“I wish the doctor would come,” Fenton said, as they watched the slow lifting of Philemon Webb’s head.  “Our fastest rider has gone for him, but he’s out Portchester way, and it may be an hour yet before he can get here.”

“Philemon!”

Mr. Sutherland had advanced and was standing by his old friend’s side.

“Philemon, what has become of your guests?  You’ve waited for them here until morning.”

The old man with a dazed look surveyed the two plates set on either side of him and shook his head.

“James and John are getting proud,” said he, “or they forget, they forget.”

James and John.  He must mean the Zabels, yet there were many others answering to these names in town.  Mr. Sutherland made another effort.

“Philemon, where is your wife?  I do not see any place set here for her!”

“Agatha’s sick, Agatha’s cross; she don’t care for a poor old man like me.”

“Agatha’s dead and you know it,” thundered back the constable, with ill-judged severity.  “Who killed her? tell me that.  Who killed her?”

A sudden quenching of the last spark of intelligence in the old man’s eye was the dreadful effect of these words.  Laughing with that strange gurgle which proclaims an utterly irresponsible mind, he cried: 

“The pussy cat!  It was the pussy cat.  Who’s killed?  I’m not killed.  Let’s go to Jericho.”

Mr. Sutherland took him by the arm and led him up-stairs.  Perhaps the sight of his dead wife would restore him.  But he looked at her with the same indifference he showed to everything else.

“I don’t like her calico dresses,” said he.  “She might have worn silk, but she wouldn’t.  Agatha, will you wear silk to my funeral?”

The experiment was too painful, and they drew him away.  But the constable’s curiosity had been roused, and after they had found some one to take care of him, he drew Mr. Sutherland aside and said: