“He told me what had happened. He said that as soon as he knew Captain Grey was coming, he began to look for some one to take his poor wife’s place. The captain hadn’t seen his sister since she was a baby, you know, and all he knew was that she was tall and dark. Dr. Quelton said he had arranged for some one to come from a hospital; and then he found me. He drove by just a little while after the accident, and he found the poor driver dead and me unconscious. He found a letter to mother in my purse, and he mailed it afterward. Then he heard another car coming along the road, and he started the engine and sent the taxi—with the dead driver in his seat—crashing down the hill, to run into the other car. He wanted the driver’s death to look like an accident. He didn’t care if the other man were killed. He’s—he’s not human, Lexy! He told me he had never in his life cared for any one except his wife. He told me what a beautiful, wonderful woman she was—and yet he had stolen her emerald when she was dying. Love! He couldn’t love any one!” But Lexy remembered her last glimpse of Dr. Quelton, lying dead across the coffin of the woman he had robbed. Who would ever know, who was to judge now, what might have been in his warped and utterly solitary heart? “He told me,” Caroline went on, “that he had never felt any great interest in me. A mediocre mind, he said I had. He told me he had never so much as touched my finger tips. He sat there, talking so calmly! He said he had kept me under the influence of some drug that made my mind suggestible—I think that’s the word. He meant that whoever took that drug would believe anything, accept anything. He had told me I was Muriel Quelton, and I believed I was. Then he told me to dye my hair, and to make up my face with things he gave me. He told me I was ill and tired and growing old, and I felt so. Lexy, he said that even without that, without making the least change in my appearance, no one would have known me, because my _mind_ was changed. He said there was no disguise in the world like that. Was it true, Lexy? Was I old, and—and horrible to every one?” “No,” Lexy briefly replied. “Then he went on. He said he had no more of the drug left, and that he’d have to dispose of me. ‘You know you’re very ill,’ he said. ‘The nurse and that young fool of a doctor agree with me. I think you’re likely to grow worse—very much worse—to-night. You’re very likely to die.’ Oh, Lexy! What could I do but agree? I was shut up—so weak and ill— I knew he could so easily give me something to kill me! He said that if I would make a will and sign it as he told me, he would let me go and be—be myself again. I couldn’t help it! And his wife was dead. It couldn’t do her any harm if I signed her name. He wrote it, and I traced it on another sheet of paper. I had to, Lexy! I knew it was wrong, but what else could I possibly do?” “Never mind, Caroline!” said Lexy. “It didn’t do any harm, dear. And then did he let you go?”