Indeed, put in any way, there could be no doubt about the oddity of the part which the woman had played. Medical examination clearly showed that death had come to her from natural causes. She must, the doctor said, have been within a hand's-breadth of death for, at any rate, the last twelve months. He declared that every vital organ was hopelessly diseased. Asked if the immediate cause of death was shock, he replied that there was nothing whatever in the condition of the body which could be regarded as supporting such a theory. In his opinion, the woman had burned out, like a candle, which, when it is all consumed, dies. Nothing, in his judgment, could have retarded the inevitable end; just as there was nothing to suggest that it came one instant sooner than might, in the natural course, have been expected. That was what the doctor said in public, at the coroner's inquest. He listened to them when, in private, they told him the strange story of the night's adventure, pronouncing at the conclusion an opinion which contained in it the essence of all wisdom, for it might be taken any way. The gist of it was this. Very probably for some time before her death, the woman had been light-headed. When people are light-headed they suffer from hallucinations. It was quite possible that, in her case, those hallucinations had taken the form--literally--of her injured husband. It was on record that hallucinations had taken form, in similar cases. It was a perfectly feasible and reasonable theory which supposed that the woman, wandering, a homeless outcast, in the streets of London, delirious, premonitions of her approaching dissolution being borne in upon her in spite of her delirium, would turn her dying footsteps towards her one-time home, to which, as her behaviour in forcing herself on Madge plainly showed, her thoughts had recently returned. Nor, under the circumstances, was there anything surprising in her delusion that her husband had led her there. It was when asked to explain how it was that she had hit upon the hiding-place of her husband's fortune--hit upon it, as it seemed, altogether against her will, that the doctor became oracular. But even here he was not without his hints as to the direction in which an explanation might be found. He pointed out that our study of the science of mental psychology was still in its infancy. But, even so far as it had gone, it seemed to suggest the possibility of what has come to be called telepathic communication between two minds--even when the whilom owner of one of the minds has passed beyond the confines of the grave. This sounded a trifle abstruse. But as the doctor professed his inability to put it any clearer, they had to take his statement as it stood, and make out just as much of it as they were able.