"How long has she known it?" cried he, panting, as he pointed to the bed. "No wonder I thought her mad. You have killed her!" he exclaimed acridly, upon another revulsion of thought. "Had you not better have a doctor?" came Lady Aspasia’s dispassionate accents. "If it’s not too late," she added cynically. Baby called out as if she had been struck, and burst into fresh tears. The inert figure on the bed was all the girl had of home, all she had of certain love. This marble woman, no longer kin to her, had lavished on her more than a mother’s care; from those lips, now so silent, except in the last sad days of trouble, Aspasia had never heard an ungentle word. "She must not die," sobbed she. "She will not die," said Harry English. He shifted his hand till it rested over Rosamond’s heart. Then he looked down at the face, with its faint smile of secret joy, pitifully exposed to all these eyes; and his own countenance took an expression of tenderness so infinite that weeping Baby, catching sight of it, held her breath. He moved and stood with his back to the bed, to shelter in some measure the unconscious woman from the violation of curious looks. "I must beg you all to go," he said. Sir Arthur, who had been gradually growing, within and without, to the purple stage of fury, now exploded. Portrait or no portrait, the story was preposterous. This fellow was an impostor! "Turn me out! ... ’Tis you, sir, I’ll turn out. I’ll have you committed, sir, I’ll——" "Please," said a voice from the door, "if any one is ill, let it not be forgotten that I am a doctor. I offer my services," said Monsieur Châtelard. *CHAPTER III* Monsieur Châtelard, compact in self-possession, precisely attired, as if he had not been called from slumber at the worst hour of the night by a sense of mortal emergency! And yet a very different Châtelard, either from the eager traveller or the genial raconteur and table companion they had known: this was Châtelard the physician—the world-renowned specialist. There was a weighty professional seriousness about him as he advanced into the room, fixing his spectacles with thumb and forefinger; an air of confident responsibility. He wasted not a second upon curiosity at the singular group by the bed, but sent his keen direct gaze straight to the patient. "She’s killed herself," was his first thought. "Poison," he murmured aloud, and his gesture was enough to clear the bedside for his own approach. "No," said a voice close to him. "Not poison-shock." M. Châtelard looked up quickly, and immediately became aware of a stranger’s presence. "Monsieur?" he exclaimed. He, too, had instantly concluded that the second man in the room must be Bethune. He was shaken into surprise. "In the name of Heaven, who are you?" "I am her husband, whom she thought dead. I took her by surprise; she fainted."