My first thought, when I knew that Violet’s confession was still undestroyed, was to hide the fact from her. I must spare her the torturing apprehensions that I felt myself. Fortunately she did not seem to be thinking of her own danger; at all events, she put no questions to me about the letters. Perhaps she took it for granted that I had secured them, or that they were no longer in existence. At all events, the possibility that they might be in other hands as dangerous as Weathered’s did not seem to strike her at the moment. The idea that I had murdered Weathered overpowered all her faculties. Again and again I went over with her all that had happened. “I don’t believe that I killed him,” I told her with the utmost earnestness. “Surely you can trust me to know what I was doing. I am not an ordinary doctor. I have made a special study of poisons, as the pupil, I may say the favourite pupil, of the greatest expert alive. I am prepared to swear to you or in any court of justice that the dose I gave him would not have killed any man in a normal condition of health. Sir Frank Tarleton and I both observed symptoms that point to some other drug having been administered to Weathered. Remember that you were not his only patient, and you are not likely to have been the only one whose confidence he abused. The Domino Club probably swarmed with his enemies, in fact the manageress as good as told us so. His own step-daughter asserts that there were other women with whom he had mysterious relations----” “Other women!” She interrupted me with a cry of dismay. “Do you mean--does she know anything about me?” I recollected Sarah Neobard’s fierce denunciation, and the scene she had described, when she sat with her hired spy in the restaurant watching the persecuted girl. I tried to explain away my unlucky slip. “No, no; I didn’t mean that for a moment. She told us that her step-father had dealings with some of his women patients, and one of the waiters in the Club described some women who were there that night. He described me among others; that is to say, he described the costume I was wearing. But he suspected that it was worn by a man. He must have keen eyes.” “Then you are under suspicion!” Her anxiety was instantly diverted from herself to me again. “Not at all,” I answered. “No one has the least suspicion who the wearer of the costume really was. The police made inquiries, and all they learned was that a similar costume had been supplied to you a year ago. They followed up the clue, and found that you were down here on the night, so that it must have been someone else in the Club. Now you see why I sent it back to you. If Sir Frank Tarleton says anything about it, all you have to do is to say that you remember having such a costume, and offer to find it and show it to him. He and the police will naturally believe that the one worn at the Club that night was a duplicate.”