Callandar’s face grew gravely compassionate.  “I think you ought to know,” he said.  “I have put off saying anything because I was not absolutely sure myself.  And I have never had quite the right opportunity of finding out.  But I have had fears for some time now that your mother is in the habit of taking some drug which—­well, which is certainly not good for her.  Do not look so frightened.  It may not be serious.  Do you remember when you first consulted me about your mother and how we both agreed that the medicine she was taking for her nervous attacks might be harmful?  I was suspicious then, but there was little to go on, only her fear of any one seeing the prescription, and a few general symptoms which might be due to various causes.  Since then I—­I have noticed things which have made me anxious.  I think for her own sake as well as yours and mine, the sooner the truth is known the better.  Are you sure the door is locked?”

“Yes,” the girl’s voice was tense, “but the window is open.  It opens on the top of the veranda.  You could enter there.”

“If that is the only way, I must take it.  I thought, I hoped that if things were as I feared she would tell me herself, but she never has.  It is useless, now, to hope for her confidence.  The instinct is so strongly for concealment.  We must help her in spite of herself.”

“Hurry then!  I shall wait here.  You will call me if necessary?”

She did not ask him exactly what it was that he feared nor did he tell her, but for the first time in many weeks they were able to look at each other as comrades look.  The eruption of the old trouble into the new obscured the latter so that, for the time at least, the sick woman behind the locked door held first place in both their thoughts.

It seemed to Esther that she waited a long time before the summons came.  Then she heard him call, “Esther!” It was a doctor’s call, cool, passionless, commanding.  She flew up the stairs, closing Jane’s door as she hurried by.  The door to her mother’s room was open.  It was brightly lighted.  The shade of the lamp had been removed and its garish yellow fell full upon the bed and the strange figure which lay there.

Mary Coombe had apparently thrown herself down fully dressed—­but in what a costume!  Surely no nightmare held anything more bizarre.  Esther had no time to notice details but she remembered afterwards how the feet were clothed in different coloured stockings and that while one displayed a gaily buckled slipper, the other was carefully laced into a tan walking boot.  Just now she could see nothing but the face, for the greatest shock was there.  It did not look like Mary’s face at all—­it was strange, old, yellow and repulsive.  Her unbrushed, lustreless hair hung about it in a dull mat, one of her hands was clutched in it—­the hand was dirty.

A terrible thought struck every vestige of colour from Esther’s cheek.  Her terrified gaze swept over the disordered room, up to the face of the man who stood there so silently, then down again to the inert woman upon the bed.  Once, not long ago, she had seen a drunken man asleep upon the roadside grass—­like this.