"Now, dear lady, I want all your sympathy." He pressed her hand again. "Your sympathy and your affection and your self-denial, even your self-effacement. I have to call upon all these estimable qualities. I have to ask of your most sacred affection--your maternal affection--a self-sacrifice of the highest, the most noble, the most generous kind." He looked into his patient's eyes. As yet there was no mesmeric response. Alice was only wondering what all this talk meant. If there was any other expression in her eyes, it was the hungry look of a mother bereft of her children. The doctor let her hand drop. "I shall succeed," he said. "Of that I have no doubt. But I fear my own power of presenting the case with the force which it demands." He then, with as much emphasis as if he were on the stage, produced a manuscript from his pocket, and unfolded it with an eye to effect. "I received this," he said, "half an hour ago. It is Lady Woodroffe's confession. It was written in the dead of night--last night. If the imagination of the writer can be trusted, it was written by order of her dead husband, who stood beside her while she wrote. The intensity of feeling with which it was written is proved by that belief." "Ghosts!" said Molly, contemptuously. "Stuff with her ghosts!" "My dear young lady"--the doctor felt that his ghostly machinery had failed--"will you kindly not interrupt? I am speaking with Mrs. Haveril on a subject which is more important to all concerned than you can understand. Pray do not interrupt." But the impression which might have been produced by the vision of the dead husband was ruined by that interruption. If a ghost does not produce his impression at the outset, he never does. Alice received the confession coldly. "Am I to read it," she asked. She opened it and read it through. What it contained we know very well. It was written quite simply, stating the plain facts without comment. The concluding words were as follows:--