"Oh, don't! don't!" pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. "You mustn't let it unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!" "We were never married," said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. "Oh, help! Someone!" called the poor reporter. "Somebody come quick." Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified. "_I could have loved him!_" she said. "Quick--'Stashie--hurry--keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress has fainted!" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BOOK IV "BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE" CHAPTER XXXI PROTECTION FROM THE MINOTAUR Dr. Melton burst open the door of the house in the Black Rock woods, and running to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. "Paul Hollister is dead!" he cried. "I read the papers," said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring. "The damn fool!" cried the doctor, his face working. "Just now! There's another child expected." Rankin's inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor's success in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. "You can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient," he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the doctor into it. "Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you happen to be up so early? It's hardly daylight." "Up! You don't suppose I've been to bed! Lydia--" His voice halted. Rankin's quiet face stirred. "She feels it--terribly?" "I can't make her out! I can't make her out!" The doctor flung this confession of failure before him excitedly. "I don't know what's in her mind, but she's evidently dangerously near--women in her condition never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden shock--they _telephoned_ it--and there was nobody there but that fool Flora--" "Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?" asked Rankin squarely. "I don't know! I don't know, I tell you! She says strange things--strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was holding Ariadne--you knew, didn't you? that she called their little girl Ariadne--?" Rankin sat down, white to the lips. "No," he said, "I didn't know that. I never heard anything about--about her married life."