“I am not sure that you are right in thinking that it was your husband who came here and left those keys. Before I say anything more I should like to look inside the safe.” Mrs. Weathered turned a wondering look on her daughter, who frowned in return. “Why?” She demanded. “Nothing has been taken. I looked myself, and the money was all there untouched. No burglar would have gone away without helping himself to it, surely?” “Perhaps it was not a burglar. It was someone who had been in your father’s company, or he could not have obtained possession of his bunch of keys.” The girl drew herself up in wrath. “Dr. Weathered is not my father sir. My mother has only been married to him five years. My name is Neobard.” A glimmering of the true situation came to me. The dead man had married a widow, an unattractive one, with a daughter old enough to resent her mother’s action and show it. There could be no reasonable doubt that she must have had money, probably a good deal, and that her daughter’s fortune had gone to enrich the step-father. I could pretty well guess the whole story. A provincial doctor with more brains than wealth had courted his rich patient to obtain the means of coming to London and setting up as a consultant in the West End. That was why neither Tarleton nor I had heard of him as a man distinguished in the profession. He had risen, not by scientific merit, but by the possession of money and an imposing manner. There were too many such cases in the medical world. By this time Mrs. Weathered had sat down and invited us to do the same. But Miss Neobard remained standing, still with the same air of suppressed indignation. Tarleton appeared not to be aware of anything strange in her manner. “Your step-father, then,” he corrected himself amiably. “Dr. Cassilis and I are better acquainted with the usual contents of a doctor’s safe than you are, I expect; and perhaps we shall be better able to judge if anything has been taken than you.” “I don’t think he kept any drugs in it, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” the girl said obstinately. It was clear that she resented our being there and was disposed to help us as little as possible. “Indeed!” The specialist turned to Mrs. Weathered, whose face showed some bewilderment at her daughter’s attitude. “Perhaps you can tell me, ma’am, if your husband specialized in any particular disease, or class of diseases.” The pale widow glanced at her daughter as though for permission to answer, and was met by a smile of scorn. “I know that he takes nervous cases,” Mrs. Weathered said with a certain hesitation. “He is a psychological expert.” She pronounced the phrase in the tone of a person who had learnt it by heart, and expected us to understand it better than she did herself. Miss Neobard’s gall overflowed at the sound. “He called himself that to begin with,” she put in sharply. “Now it is a psychical analyst. Women come and tell him their secrets as if he were a priest.”