She sat down beside him on the bench, and relieved her overburdened heart by talking freely. They seemed an incongruous couple, the grizzled lady in her broadcloth suit and the sailor in his blue serge, yet their relationship drew them together. In former days she would have repudiated it with scorn; now her enlarged and wandering sympathies went out to this man with cousinly interest. She talked freely to him of her fears with regard to her brother, of her failing health, if means might be taken to protect Chelda and Derrice from the knowledge of their connection with the criminal, until at last, warned of the flight of time by the sun dipping lower behind the pines, she rose. "We must go," she said, regretfully, "but remember, I want to see more of you. I have not much longer to live. The doctors say I am mistaken, but I don't believe them. I know what this thumping, fluttering heart means. Come often to French Cross while I am here,--you and your wife, of course." CHAPTER XXVII. H. ROBINSON AND HIS REVELATION. Chelda, meanwhile, was having her interview with H. Robinson. Captain White had not told her that the Bangor and Rossignol train was two hours late. She had only found that out by telephoning to the station. She was considerably annoyed by it. She was also annoyed by the detective's presumption in coming to see her, and when he did arrive she confronted him with a cool and haughty stare. Yet she was slightly curious with regard to him. The whole criminal world was unknown to her, but it possessed a strange fascination for her, and this small experience had convinced her that she would have made an excellent detective herself, one better qualified by nature than this puffy, red-faced individual, gasping for breath in the cool library. He was by no means her ideal of a detective. She had imagined that he would be tall and lean, a serpentine kind of a man, capable of twisting himself into innumerable Protean shapes, whereas he was short and stout, and of a fiery redness of complexion. How could he ever disguise those cheeks of alarming hue, those sausages of arms and posts of legs? She did not like him. It irritated her to have him sit gazing at her with his moist, gooseberry-coloured eyes, while he mopped his perspiring face with a new handkerchief stiff with the creases in which it had come out of some second-rate Boston store. She was in haste to get him away from the house. Her aunt might return unexpectedly, and her restless curiosity would be sure to result in disagreeable discoveries, therefore she opened the conversation by saying, "If we are interrupted and you are questioned, I wish you would let it be supposed that you are some one in search of employment."