Louise Hansbury did not go out for her customary “constitutional” that morning. She arose, tired and depressed after a sleepless night. Soon after she had her breakfast,—chocolate and toast and a prescribed porridge,—she complained of a sudden and violent nausea.

Mrs. Carstairs went in to see her, and was alarmed. She took the girl's temperature and then called up the doctor.

“You have a fever,” she said. “You must go back to bed. It's nothing, I daresay, but we have to be on the safe side, dear.”

Louise betrayed her agitation. She pleaded to be allowed to dress and go out for her walk. There were moments when actual fear lurked in her dark eyes.

“I will be all right in a little while, Aunt Frieda. Don't be cross with me. I must have eaten something last night that disagreed with me. The lobster,—I ate a tiny bit of it.”

“Very likely,” said her aunt calmly. “All the more reason for being careful today. No, my dear, I must insist on your remaining in bed,—at least until Dr. Browne has seen you.”

“When is he coming?”

“The attendant said she could locate him and would send him here as soon as possible. He is out making his calls.”

“The chocolate tasted queerly this morning, Aunt Frieda,” said the girl, feverishly.

“Imagination. Nothing tastes right when one's stomach is upset.”

“Oh, I want so much to get out for a breath of fresh air. It is a perfectly lovely day. I am sure Dr. Browne will say it's the best thing in the world—”

“Dr. Browne doesn't know everything,” interrupted Mrs. Carstairs. She laid her hand on the girl's hot forehead. “You must go back to bed,—just for a little while,” she said, and there was an inexorableness in her tone that roused swift resentment in Louise. A rebellious, angry light smouldered in her eyes. “I know what is best for you. If it should turn out to be ptomaine poisoning—”

“It can't be ptomaine if it came from the chocolate I drank,” sad Louise, excitement causing her voice to tremble and to take on a certain shrillness.

“I am confident it is all due to nervousness,” said Mrs. Carstairs. She spoke in a patient, consoling manner. “Dr. Browne will give you something to straighten out your digestion, and you will be all right by tomorrow. You are not strong yet, you know. Just be patient, my dear. It takes time.”

“I should like to telephone, Aunt Frieda,” said the girl abruptly. Submissive to the gentle but unyielding authority of the older woman, who dominated as one with the power to scourge if resistance continued, she had begun to divest herself, rather helplessly, of the gay peignoir in which she had breakfasted. With feverish haste, she slipped her arms through the loose folds, and faced her aunt. There was defiance in her glance. For an instant it held.

The calm smile and the tolerant shake of the head, as to a pleading child, shattered her resolve; she saw that argument was useless. The robe fell from her shoulders as she turned away with a sob in her throat.

“Is it important?” inquired the older woman.

“I—this afternoon will do as well, I suppose,” replied the girl, without turning her head.

“Let me call up for you, dear. It is no trouble at all. I can explain that you are ill.”

“No, thank you, Aunt Frieda. It—it doesn't matter.”

She hesitated about confiding to Mrs. Carstairs that she was going out to meet her lover. Something told her that it would be the wrong thing to do,—something that for want of another name would have to go as cunning. She shared a vague, disturbing secret with Steele....

Mrs. Carstairs tucked the bedclothes about her.

“The doctor will be here soon, I am sure,” she said. “Do you feel any better? Are you more comfortable?”

“I am in no pain,—if that's what you mean. Just this wretched nausea. What do the morning papers say about the loss of the Elston, Aunt Frieda?”

“Nothing, I believe. Your uncle says there was no mention of it. I daresay the news has been held up for the time being. Waiting for full details. Wasn't it fortunate,—wasn't it providential that the transfer to the Campion was so cleverly accomplished?”

A maid-servant came to the door.

“You are wanted on the telephone, Mrs. Carstairs. Shall I say you are engaged?”

“Who is it, Wrenn?”

“A gentleman. I couldn't catch the name, Mrs. Carstairs.”

“I will see who it is.”

After she had closed Louise's door behind her, Frieda Carstairs stood stockstill in the long corridor. She put her hand to her breast and held it there lightly, as if to transmit its vital strength to the organ which pounded so violently. Her tall figure was tense; her face took on the pallor of death and its rigidity. For as long as fifteen or twenty seconds, she remained motionless. Then her lips moved stiffly; they twitched as in a spasm of pain. The two words they formed hut did not utter were:

“Poor girl!”

Once, as she covered the short distance to her own sitting-room, her figure swayed slightly. She even put out a hand to steady herself against the wall,—a needless precaution, for she instantly regained command of herself.

She closed the door, and, before taking up the receiver, threw in the device which cut out the instrument from other extensions in the apartment,—those in the butler's pantry, her husband's study, and the one that stood on the night-table at the head of his bed. Her knees suddenly became weak; they trembled as with the palsy. She sat down at the writing table and dropped her elbow heavily on the top. Again she feared that she was going to faint.

“Yes?” she murmured thickly into the transmitter, and, instantly realizing that her voice betrayed nervousness and even alarm, repeated the word firmly, crisply. “Yes,—this is Mrs. Carstairs.”

“I am speaking for the Evening——” (the name of the newspaper was indistinctly pronounced)—“and I called up, Mrs. Carstairs, to ask if it is true that Captain Derrol Steele was engaged to be married to your niece, Miss Louise Hansbury?”

She did not reply. Her lips parted but no sound issued forth.

Again the voice spoke in her ear. “Are you there?”

The “yes” she uttered in reply was little more than a hoarse gasp. And then: “I hear you quite distinctly.” There was a click at the other end. Slowly, as in a daze, she hung up the receiver. Not another word passed.

She did not leave the apartment that day, but spent most of the time with her niece, whose indisposition was promptly diagnosed as an acute attack of indigestion by the learned and complacent physician, who dosed her and went his way. He ordered her to remain in bed; he would run in and see her in the morning. If anything, ah!—a—alarming turned up, he murmured to Mrs. Carstairs, she was to call him at once. Not likely, of course, said he, nothing to be apprehensive about, but—well, you never can tell. Resistance not yet fully restored,—and, “after all, as I've said all along, Mrs. Carstairs, one's own resistance is the best chemistry going, and one has to fill his own prescription when it comes to that sort of thing, don't you know.”

Being a very fashionable doctor he gave her pyromedan to bring down the temperature in a hurry, and codeine to quiet the pain.

Davenport Carstairs seldom reached his home before six or half-past. It was his custom,—if business happened to be indulgent,—to drop in at his favourite club about four in the afternoon. On this afternoon, however, he drove straight home from the office. The clock in the hall was striking four as he entered the apartment. The afternoon newspapers were under his arm,—four or five of them.

“Has Mrs. Carstairs come in, Hollowell?” he asked.

“Mrs. Carstairs did not go out today, sir. Miss Hansbury is ill.”

Ordinarily Carstairs would have been disturbed by this information. He had been gravely worried over his niece's condition. Hollowell's supplementary statement, however, appeared to have fallen on deaf ears.

“Say that I'm home, Hollowell, and in my room.”

“Very good, sir. Is there anything I can do, sir?”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“I thought perhaps you might be ill, sir. I—”

“Not at all, not at all,” somewhat irascibly. “Ask Mrs. Carstairs to come to my room—Wait! Have you had any news here today?”

“No, sir,—nothink as I am aware of, sir.”

“No—er—commotion?”

“I think not, sir. It isn't serious. Sort of—ah—what you might call stomach—ah—although cook says it can't have been anything she ate last—”

“By the way, what made you think I was ill?”

“Well,—since you ask, sir,—you do look a bit seedy, sir,—that is to say pale and—”

“I wish to see Mrs. Carstairs alone. Please avoid mentioning my return in Miss Hansbury's presence.”

He went at once to his study, where, moved by the remark of the butler, he stared long and hard at his features in a mirror. His face was ashen grey, and suddenly, strangely old.

He had tossed the newspapers on the rare old Italian table in the centre of the room. After a few moments of complete abstraction, his dull, frowning gaze was raised from the floor to sweep the room,—which, for some strange, almost uncanny cause, seemed almost unfamiliar to him. And yet it was the same,—nothing had been changed. Only he had altered—his own perspective had undergone a vast, incomprehensible change. His eyes falling upon the papers, he took them up, one by one, and stared again at a certain headline in each,—a raw caption that fascinated him and hurt him like the cut of a knife.

It did not occur to him until long afterwards, and then only in retrospective contemplation of events that filled the most important day in his life, that his wife was a long time in appearing. She came into the study at last, and, as was her unvarying custom, pressed her lips to his cheek. He noticed that her lips, always moist and soft and alive, were hot and dry and as dead as parchment. Before he spoke a word to her, he crossed the room and closed the door into the hall.

She was staring at him in amazement as he turned toward her again.

“What has happened, Davenport! You—you look so strange,—so—Oh, something dreadful has happened! Is it—is it Alfred! Tell me! For God's sake, don't—”

“It isn't Alfred, my dear,” said he. There was a dull, hollow note in his voice,—a note that held to one key. “Where is Louise!”

“In bed. She hasn't been well—”

“We must manage somehow to break this thing gently to her. It might—there is no telling what it may do to her, Frieda.”

She steadied herself against the table. Her face now was as white as his. It had been pale before; now it was livid.

“What is it, Davenport?” He looked searchingly, anxiously into her eyes for a moment, and then said: “It will be a shock to you too, Frieda,—but I know you. You can take it like a soldier. Derrol Steele shot himself last night. He is dead. He—There, there, dearest! I shouldn't have blurted it out like—sit down here, Frieda! That's right! Poor old girl! Curse me for a blundering fool! I might have known it would be a dreadful shock to you. You were devoted to him. He—”

“Tell me,—tell me everything, Davenport,” she broke in, her eyes fixed on his lips. She did not look into his eyes. He was leaning over her, clasping one of her hands,—a hand that suddenly became limp after the utmost rigidity. “Just a moment. Compose yourself. Pull yourself together, dear. It's—it's a cruel story—an incredible story. I would have staked my soul on Derrol Steele. I've known him since he was a little boy. If I had been asked to name the most honourable, the most loyal man in the—but, Frieda, I was wrong—I was deceived in him,—just as you were—and Louise. Louise! God, how this will crush that poor, innocent, loving—”

“Tell me!” she insisted, her fingers tightening on his, her voice scarcely more than a whisper.

For answer, he placed the newspaper in her hands, and pointed to the headline at the top of the page.

“Read it, Frieda. Read this first.”

He sat on the edge of the table, his arms folded across his breast, and waited for her to finish. At last the paper fell from her fingers and she looked up into his face. Her eyes were bleak.

“I can't believe it, Davenport,—I will not believe it of Derrol Steele.”

“As soon as I saw the paper,—about two o'clock, I should say,—I hurried over to the United States Attorney's office. The story is true, Frieda. It appears that a secret service agent—'gad, how marvellous they are!—an agent overheard scraps of a conversation between two men late last night,—in front of a little French restaurant, I think it was. Steele's name was mentioned two or three times. He was not interested, however, until he heard them speak of a man long suspected by the department. Then he pricked up his ears. The marshal did not repeat the name, for obvious reasons. The man heard enough to convince him that this suspect and one or two other men were to be at Steele's apartment before three o'clock this morning. The address was carefully, precisely given by one of the men, who was very greatly agitated. Captain Steele had vital information in his possession,—that much, at least, the listener was able to grasp. One sentence he heard distinctly. I recall it clearly. 'Tomorrow will be too late,' This was enough for the agent. He was too clever to arrest these men on the spot. The way was clear for the seizure of at least four or five men, including an officer in the United States Army. So he—are you listening, dear?”

“Yes, yes!” she replied, as if waking from a dream.

“This agent had been set there to watch for a man and a woman, posing as French people, who are under surveillance. As soon as the speakers parted, he rushed up the street to an hotel, and called up headquarters. This was too big a thing to be sidetracked for the French couple. Several operatives were dispatched immediately to assist him. They went to the building where Derrol lives—or lived. They seized the driver of the taxi-cab, but the others evidently got wind of the raid, for when they went up to Steele's apartment, hoping to catch them in the place with him, they found him alone. He had slipped a bath gown over his pajamas and was undoubtedly waiting for his fellow-conspirators. He realized in an instant that he was trapped. They smashed in the door. While the violent noise was going on, he shot himself. They did not hear the report, however, due to the clatter and to the fact that there was a silencer on the revolver. There was the faintest sign of a pulse, indicating that the shot had been fired only a minute or two before they burst in and discovered him sitting in a chair not twenty feet from the door.”

The tears rolled down the cheeks of Davenport Carstairs. His voice broke.

“I can't believe it of him, Frieda,—I can't believe it.”

Her face was ghastly. “We have the proof, Davenport,—the indisputable proof,” she murmured.

“The proof? What proof have we?”

“The best proof in the world. He shot himself. Only a guilty man would have taken his own life in the circumstances. We—we must believe it of him, Davenport. That poor, sick girl! How are we to tell her?”

Of the two, she was now by far the more composed. Except for the colourless lips and an almost lavender-like hue that stole slowly into her cheeks just below the temples, indicative of the vast effort she had been called upon to exert in order to regain command of her nerves, she was visibly calm and self-contained. Her husband had sunk dejectedly into a chair. For many minutes no word passed between them. It was she who spoke first.

“You say they caught one of the men—one of the others, I mean?” she inquired.

“The taxi-driver.”

Her lips parted to form another question. She withheld it. With her handkerchief she wiped away the moisture that suddenly appeared at the corners of her mouth—oozing from between close-pressed lips.

She read the accounts in the other papers, her face absolutely emotionless. After a while he looked up, and, unobserved, watched her face.

“You are a very wonderful woman, Frieda,” he said as she laid the last of the papers on the table. Her answer was a faint smile and a shake of the head.

She arose and started resolutely toward the door. As she neared it, she faltered, and then turned back to him.

“Davenport, I have just had a most disturbing thought. It also may have occurred to you. Derrol Steele was a trusted and familiar guest in this house. He heard many important,—let me go on, please,—I can see revulsion in your eyes. Whether we like it or not, we must look at it squarely from every point of view. Last night, for example, he heard the Admiral; he heard what the Countess had to say about the Italian situation. Going farther back, you yourself spoke in his presence of the sailing of the Elston with all those men on board.”

“I see what is in your mind, Frieda,” he said slowly. “You mean we may be dragged into it?”

“Not at all,” she said rather sharply. “We need not be drawn into it in the slightest degree unless we volunteer information that concerns no one but ourselves. Why should any one know that he came into possession of facts here in our home?”

“Such things are bound to leak out, my dear. The investigation will be thorough. They will go to the bottom of this. Of course, I can manage it so that we sha'n't come in for any publicity, but we can't escape questioning.”

“And are we to admit that we discussed these very grave and important matters in his presence?”

“We are to tell the truth, Frieda. You should not forget that we spoke of them in the presence of an officer in the United States Army.”

After a moment she said: “I daresay you are right, Davenport. You are always right. I was only thinking that in view of the fact that there is no proof against him except the few words overheard by that man in front of the cafÉ,—well, it is possible, don't you see, that there may have been some horrid, appalling mistake. They have no other proof,—unless the United States Attorney withheld something from you.”

“They have the best proof in the world. He shot himself, as you have said.”

She half closed her eyes. A queer little spasm twisted her lips apart.

“Yes,” she said unsteadily, “yes, he shot himself.”

Her hand was on the door-knob.

“Are you going in to tell her now, Frieda?”

“I must have a little time,—just a little, dear. I am more shaken than you think. I must have time to collect myself. It will be very difficult, Davenport. Stay here. Do not come unless I call to you.”

“I leave it all to you, Frieda,—God bless you and God give you strength.”

The door closed behind her. He sat motionless for a long time, wondering whether he could hear her call to him with that door and doubtless another intervening. Strange that she should have closed it. He would wait a little while,—a few minutes only,—and then he would open it and—listen.

She went straight to her own room.... Presently she lifted the telephone receiver from the hook. The next moment she replaced it, but did not release it from her tense fingers.

She sat rigid, staring at the instrument, resolve and indecision struggling for mastery. At last she pushed the instrument away and sank back in the chair as if exhausted.