The woman made no reply. She was still on her knees, bending over the prostrate figure, from whose lips now came a faint moaning. Then the lights of the car flashed out as it left the garage, passed through the iron gates and drew up a few yards away. “Help him in,” Dominey ordered. “You can loosen his cords, Johnson, as soon as you have started. He has very little strength. Tell them at the hospital I shall probably be there during the day, or to-morrow.” With a little shiver the two men stooped to their task. Their prisoner muttered to himself all the time, but made no resistance. Rachael Unthank, as she stepped in to take her place by his side, turned once more to Dominey. She was a broken woman. “You're rid of us,” she sobbed, “perhaps forever.--You've said harsh things of both of us. Roger isn't always--so bad. Sometimes he's more gentle than at others. You'd have thought then that he was just a baby, living there for love of the wind and the trees and the birds. If he comes to--” Her voice broke. Dominey's reply was swift and not unkind. He pointed to the window above. “If Lady Dominey recovers, you and your son are forgiven. If she never recovers, I wish you both the blackest corner of hell.” The car drove off. Doctor Harrison met Dominey on the threshold as he turned towards the house. “Her ladyship is unconscious now,” he announced. “Perhaps that is a good sign. I never liked that unnatural calm. She'll be unconscious, I think, for a great many hours. For God's sake, come and get a whisky and soda and give me one!” The early morning sunshine lay upon the park when the two men at last separated. They stood for a moment looking out. From the Black Wood came the whirr of a saw. The little troop of men had left their tents. The crash of a fallen tree heralded their morning's work. “You are still going on with that?” the doctor asked. “To the very last stump of a tree, to the last bush, to the last cluster of weeds,” Dominey replied, with a sudden passion in his tone. “I will have that place razed to the bare level of the earth, and I will have its poisonous swamps sucked dry. I have hated that foul spot,” he went on, “ever since I realised what suffering it meant to her. My reign here may not be long, Doctor--I have my own tragedy to deal with--but those who come after me will never feel the blight of that accursed place.” The doctor grunted. His inner thoughts he kept to himself. “Maybe you're right,” he conceded. CHAPTER XXIX The heat of a sulphurous afternoon--a curious parallel in its presage of coming storm to the fast-approaching crisis in Dominey's own affairs--had driven Dominey from his study on to the terrace. In a chair by his side lounged Eddy Pelham, immaculate in a suit of white flannels. It was the fifth day since the mystery of the Black Wood had been solved.