Late one night, in the second half of the month, the crime doctor, seated like a waxwork in a chair that never creaked, had just made sure that his man was asleep at last. He decided to steal out and write some letters, and take them to the post himself before locking up; and was getting by inches to his catlike feet, when some sense held him bent like a bow. It could hardly have been his hearing, in his own sound-proof sanctuary between double windows and triple doors. Yet suddenly he was all on edge, listening with nerves laid bare by forced vigils in that slumberous room, brown as an Arab in its weird lighting; the silver patch in his hair changed from a florin to a new penny, the whites of his eyes like broad gold rings; their one flaw augmented by an infinite fatigue, their one care the human wreckage on the bed--shattered utterly by him, to be by him built up afresh, but not in the midst of excursions and alarms. And here was the inmost door opening, so softly, so slowly, at deadliest dead of night! It was a woman who entered like a ghost, and he knew her step, though he could not hear it even now. And though her cloak and head-dress were those of a trained nurse, he knew, rather than saw, that the wearer was Lady Vera Moyle. "Hush!" she was the first to whisper, and very softly closed the last door, through which he would have hurried her out again. Already her soundless movements, her air of vast precaution, puzzled him even more than her presence or her dress; but he still had anxieties on this side of the door. "Just asleep," he whispered, pointing to the bed. "Bad time I've given him, poor brute, but a better one coming, I do believe. Did you come to see how he was doing?" Even in the stained light she looked so beaming now, so frankly triumphant, he made sure that was it. "I'd have written, but thought you were away. Who let you in?" "This!" And she held up a new Yale key. "Where did you get it?" "Specially cut for me." Every line in his red man's face was a note of blank interrogation. "Mostyn Scarth has another--cut specially for him! I've had him watched." "Vera!" "_I_ was watching _for_ him--from the nursing home opposite--suffrage friends of mine." "Why didn't you tell me?" "You had enough to do." He shook his head. "Well?" "He's somewhere in the house." "This house?" "Why didn't you tell me?" She nodded. "Hiding--in your room, I think." "I'll soon have him out!" "Wait!" She had eyes for the amber bed at last. "Are you sure he's asleep?" Dollar stole across and back. The great frame was breathing gently and evenly as a child. "But he's a terribly light sleeper; we mustn't disturb him, if we can help it." "Disturb him!" She clutched his hand for the first time. "I wish to God I had never brought him to you! There's a plot between them, doctor--I know there's some plot!"