He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of her since she had left his hands.

‘The parish officer is taking his holiday,’ he added.  ’I mean to inquire about her.  I wish I could take her to Paris to the Salpetriere, where Marini is treating such cases by transmitting through magnetism the patient’s seizure to a healthy subject.’

‘Will she recover?’

‘Without the Salpetriere treatment?’

‘Will she recover?’ I asked, maddened beyond endurance by all this cold-blooded professional enthusiasm about a case which was simply a case of life and death to Winnie and me.

’She may, unless the seizures become too frequent for the strength of the constitution.  In that event, of course, she would succumb.  She is entirely harmless, let me tell you.’

He told me that she was at the cottage, where some good soul was seeing after her.

‘I’ll get up,’ I said, trying to rise.

‘Get up!’ said the doctor, astonished; ’why do you want to get up?  You are not strong enough to sit in a chair yet.’

This was, alas! but too true, and my great object now was to conceal my weakness; for I determined to get out as soon as my legs could carry me, though I should drop down dead on the road.

I gathered from the doctor and the servants that the sacrilege had now become publicly known, and had caused much excitement.  Wynne had evidently been slightly intoxicated when he committed it, and had taken no care to conceal the proofs that the grave had been tampered with.  At the inquest the amulet had been identified and claimed by my mother.

It was some days before I got out, and then I went at once to the cottage.  It was a lovely evening as I walked down Wilderness Road.  It was not till I reached the little garden-gate that I began fully to feel how weak my illness had left me.  The gate was half open, and I looked over into the garden, which was already forlorn and deserted.  Some instinct told me she was not there.  The little flower-beds looked shaggy, grass-grown, and uncared for.  In the centre, among the geraniums, phlox-beds, and French marigolds, sat a dirty-white hen, clucking and calling a brood of dirty-white chickens.  The box-bordered gravelled paths, which Wynne, in spite of his drunkenness, used to keep always so neat, were covered with leaves, shaken by the wind from the trees surrounding the garden.  One of the dark green shutters was unfastened, and stood out at right-angles from the wall—­a token of desertion.  On the diamond panes of the upper windows, round which the long tendrils of grape-vines were drooping, the gorgeous sunset was reflected, making the glass gleam as though a hundred little fires were playing behind it.  When I reached the door, the paint of which seemed far more cracked with the sun than it had looked a few weeks before, I found on knocking that the cottage was empty.  I did not linger, but went at once into the town to inquire about her.