A cry from Patrine prodded Sherbrand to active sympathy. So at last they had told her. She knew all. And true to her type she was raging at the Doctor and the Chief like a very termagant; upbraiding them with a spate of words rushing over her writhing lips and lioness-frenzy in her blazing eyes. "I begged you not to let him go!" This was to the Doctor. "Faint! Do you take me for a bally idiot—to faint when there’s something to be done! Follow that man and get him back! If he takes him away to Germany—don’t you know we shall never see Bawne again! Oh! why—why can’t I make you understand!" The raging voice grew hoarse with sobs, though her furious eyes were dry as enamel. She added with an inflection that made Sherbrand blink and gulp: "Don’t you know—don’t you _know_ it will kill Aunt Lynette? And I shall be guilty—I who love them so! Oh, God, I must do something or die raving mad!" The Doctor’s great arm held her firmly round the body. Saxham was strong as an oak-tree, but who can control a woman in the frenzy of hysteria, standing six feet tall in high-heeled No. 7 shoes? She wrestled and fought, and her tawdry hat of silver spangles tumbled off, and her superb hair shed its pins of tortoiseshell, and rolled, yellow-tawny as a South African torrent in flood-time, down over her heaving shoulders, over the supple back and writhing loins, reaching nearly to her knees. Then her strength went from her, and her tears came. She dropped into a chair Sherbrand had got her, and crumpled up there, crying bitterly. *CHAPTER XXXVII* *PATRINE CONFESSES* With her hat off and her hairpins out, and her tawny-coloured mane tumbling over her heaving shoulders, the superb illusion of maturity vanished. The three men viewed Patrine with clear, unprejudiced eyes. Stripped of the magic cloak of Circe, here was no transformer of Man into the hoofed and rooting mammal, but a great galumphing schoolgirl, pouring out a heartful of trouble, without the least concern for her complexion; mopping her streaming eyes with a little sopping handkerchief; temporarily ending its brief career of usefulness with a dismal blast upon the nose. "Take mine!" said Saxham, thrusting the large-sized square of cambric upon her. "Th—thank you, Uncle Owen!" She said it in the voice of a child. The torrent of tears, so different from those shed earlier, had washed her heart clean. Something hard and cynical and evil had passed out of her. She was Bawne’s dear Pat again. A lean brown hand that wore a chipped and ancient signet was next held out to her. She grasped it and was straightway hauled upon her feet. "Are you better?" said a friendly voice, in a crisp way. "I—think so. Thank you, Sir Roland!" She added in a tone as tear-soaked as her handkerchief, while Saxham offered her her hat, and Sherbrand tendered tortoiseshell hairpins: "I’m awfully afraid I have behaved like a fool!"