"Your coming, and even the telling of your story, ought not to be enough to account for Mrs. Stanforth's collapsing in this way," the doctor answered, a puzzled look in his eyes. "She is such a singularly sane, well-balanced woman, that one feels there must have been something quite unusual to account for her fainting so suddenly. As far as you know, she had no shock?" "No; none," Christina replied. "I mean, I know of no shock. I was just sitting by her bed, telling her about Sir Arthur and his accusation, and she was very much interested, and asked if I had the pendant with me. And directly she saw it, she got quite white, and she said something I could not understand, about the initials over the emerald; and then, all at once, she dropped back and was unconscious in a few seconds." Fergusson looked keenly at the speaker. "Mrs. Stanforth had never seen this pendant before?" "No; never," it was Christina's turn to look puzzled. "I had never seen her until the day she came out to the gate to ask me to fetch a doctor. To all intents and purposes she and I are strangers." "It seems rather incomprehensible, like a good many things connected with this house," Fergusson said, under his breath. He and Christina stood in what was evidently the drawing-room of the house--a long low room, furnished with the rather heavy and uninteresting furniture of the early Victorian period, the light-coloured chintzes on the chairs and sofas, and the pale grey of the walls, giving the only relief to the dinginess of the apartment. "I am not more inquisitive than the rest of mankind," Fergusson went on, his eyes glancing round the room into which he had never before penetrated, "but I confess this establishment and its mistress do arouse my curiosity. However, her affairs are no affair of ours," he wound up briskly, "and my business now is to make her----" he broke off abruptly, and looked keenly at Christina, a great sadness in his eyes. "No, I can't say 'make her well'; there is no hope of that; but I've got to make her better." "Do you mean," Christina asked; "do you mean--that she--can't--get really well?" Fergusson shook his head. "She is worn out; something has worn her out; whether a long strain, or a great sorrow, I cannot say. But she has no more resisting power; she has come to the end of it all. And she is too ill now to be able to right herself again." "It seems so dreadful," Christina whispered. "So much in life seems so dreadful," he answered kindly; "but when some day we learn the reason for all that made things so impossible to understand, we shall know that the pattern has been worked out exactly right, by Hands far more skilful than ours. We can see only such a little bit of the pattern now. By and by we shall see the whole." "Mrs. Stanforth is asking for the young lady," Elizabeth's voice sounded from the door. "She seems more like herself now; and she wants the young lady to come to her at once."