She had kept Valentine waiting more than half an hour. He had little more than half an hour at most in which to break the ice of absolute strangeness, and sound the very depths of this woman's character. If she had come to him earlier, when his plan of action was clear and definite, his imagination in abeyance, he would have gone cautiously to work, with slowness and deliberation. Coming to him now, when his mind, unsettled by the discovery of fresh evidence against Philip Sheldon, was divided between the past and the present, she took him off his guard, and he plunged at once into the subject that absorbed all his thoughts. Mrs. Woolper looked from Valentine to the open books on the table with a vague terror in her face. "I am sorry I was so long, sir; but I'd been polishing the grates and fenders, and such like, and my hands and face were blacker than a sweep's. I hope there's nothing wrong at the seaside, where Miss--" "There is much that's wrong, Mrs. Woolper--hopelessly, irrecoverably wrong. Miss Halliday is ill, very ill--doomed to die, if she remain in your master's keeping." "Lord help us, Mr. Hawkehurst! what do you mean?" The terror in her face was no longer a vague terror. It had taken a form and substance, and was a terror unutterably hideous, if ever human countenance gave expression to human thought. "I mean that your master is better skilled in the use of the agents that kill than the agents that cure. Charlotte's father came to Philip Sheldon's house a hale strong man, in the very prime of manhood. In that house he sickened of a nameless disease, and died, carefully tended by his watchful friend. The same careful watcher stands by Charlotte Halliday's deathbed, and she is dying!" "Dying! O, sir, for God's sake, don't say that!" "She is dying, as her father died before her, by the hand of Philip Sheldon." "O, sir! Mr. Hawkehurst!" cried the old woman, with clasped hands lifted in piteous supplication towards her master's denouncer. "It's not true. It is not true. For God's dear love don't tell me it is true! I nursed him when he was a baby, sir; and there wasn't a little trouble I had to bear with him that didn't make him all the dearer to me. I have sat up all the night through, sir, times and often, when he was ill, and have heard Barlingford church clock strike every hour of the long night; and O, if I had known that this could ever come to him, I should have wished him dead in the little crib where he lay and seemed so innocent. I tell you, sir, it can't be true! His father and mother had been respected and looked up to in Barlingford for many a year,--his grandfather and grandmother before them. There isn't a name that stands better in those parts than the name of Sheldon. Do you think such a man would poison his friend?" "_I_ said nothing about poison, Mrs. Woolper," said Valentine, sternly.