The pale, weak woman had suddenly been transformed in Tarleton’s eyes into a heroine. He saw in her someone greater than himself. He was the official, salaried guardian of society, called upon to run no risks that a brave man ought to fear. But this forlorn woman, without a friend in whom she could confide, without support from public opinion or from the law, had taken into her trembling hands the task of delivering her sister women from a wretch whom neither opinion nor the law could reach. Mrs. Neobard--she had surely earned her right to be called that now--thanked the doctor for his impulsive action with a look. But it was not a look of triumph. She proceeded with her story in the tone of a loser rather than a victor. “Miss Sebright told me that she had felt a longing to become a mother, which she had no hope of satisfying because she suffered from a depravity, a club foot. She had been told as a child that no man would ever want to marry her, except for her money, and the result had been to make her distrust every man who came near her. It was a sad story and I’m afraid it is true of other women. Their self-distrust robs them of the happiness within their reach, if they only knew it.” The speaker sighed as though contrasting their fate with her own opposite mistake. “She told me she had come to my husband to have the longing driven out of her mind; instead of which he had persuaded her to become the mother of an illegitimate child, by a man whose name was not told her. The child was never born, happily--or unhappily; I daren’t say which. But she had written letters that disclosed what she had done, and now the doctor was holding them over her. He hadn’t gone so far as to demand money, but he was compelling her to come or write to him every week and charging her high fees. She would rather have paid a lump sum to end it. The persecution was driving her out of her mind. The poor thing actually offered me a thousand pounds.” It was a sickening story. Hardened as he was to the ways of criminals, Tarleton listened to it with nausea. “I promised to find the letters and return them to her if I could. I had to go to work secretly. If I had said anything to my husband it would have put him on his guard, and he would have placed the letters somewhere out of my reach. I spied on him till I saw him one day through the keyhole going to a cupboard in the wall of his dressing-room,--the one you found.” The consultant forbore to correct her by saying that the discovery had been made by Inspector Charles. “Of course, it was locked and I had no key that would open it. So I went to an ironmonger’s one day when the doctor was away for the week-end, and asked him to send a confidential man to open it. I pretended that my husband had lost the key while he was away on a holiday, and wanted something in the cupboard to be sent to him. I don’t know if they believed me, but they said nothing, and they made me a new key.”