Again Mr. Pym went into the presence of Mrs. St. John, the two servants with him. She looked more ghastly than before, and she was sitting with Georgy on her lap, the child sick and trembling still. Mr. Pym mentioned to her what Honour said about the doors being fastened, asking if she could remember whether the one leading from her dressing-room was open in the morning She answered at once--and she spoke with the calmest and coldest self-possession, which seemed as a very contrast to her ghastly face--that she could not say with any certainty whether the dressing-room door was open that day or not. She remembered quite well that she had unbolted it that same morning while she was getting up, upon hearing the children's voices in the nursery. She had gone in to kiss them and wish them happiness on their birthday. Whether she had rebolted the door afterwards or not, she could not say. She generally rebolted it when she had been that way into the nursery, but it was possible she had not done so this morning. "I wish you would not ask these questions," she concluded, momentarily raising her eyes to Mr. Pym, for she had spoken with her face bent down, almost hidden. "But I must ask them," said the surgeon. "It frightens George so," she added. "See how he is shivering." And in truth the child was shivering; shivering and trembling as one in an ague. Almost as his mother spoke, he raised himself with a cry, and was violently sick: and all Mr. Pym's attention had to be given to him. CHAPTER XVI. INVESTIGATION. The inquest was held the day following the death. A somewhat hurried arrangement; but in these small local places the convenience of the coroner has to be studied. It happened that the county coroner was coming to Alnwick that day to hold an inquest on a poor old man who had been accidentally killed; and the Alnwick parish officials, represented chiefly by the beadle, decided that the second inquest should take place as soon as the first was over. It did so. The first was held at the workhouse, and was over and done with in half-an-hour; the second was held at a public-house nearer the Hall: the Carleton Arms. The same jury sworn for the other inquest, attended for this one; and the witnesses were hurriedly collected without any formal process of summons-serving.