On the floor lay open a little dirty-paged book which must have fallen from his hand. She picked it up, glanced through it, could make nothing of it, for it was all in tiny Russian script. The horrible relation between this derelict book and the almost emptied whisky decanter occurred to her oversensitive brain. Then came suddenly the memory of a stupid argument of months ago at The Point and his justification of the plagiarist. Further, his putting of a hypothetical case—the finding on the body of a dead man a notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper. . . . She held in her hand such a notebook. It dropped from her nerveless fingers. Suddenly she sprang with a low cry to her husband and shook him by the shoulders. “Alexis. Alexis. Wake up. For God’s sake.” But the unaccustomed drug of the alcohol held him in stupor. She tried again, wildly. “Alexis, wake up and tell me what I think isn’t true.” At last she realized that he would lie there until the effect of the whisky had worn off. Mechanically, she put a cushion behind his head and adjusted his limbs to a position of comfort. Mechanically, too, she put the stopper in the decanter and replaced the siphon on the silver tray, and with her scrap of a handkerchief tried to remove the ring which the wet siphon had made on the table. Then she looked hopelessly round the otherwise undisturbed and beloved room. What could be done until Alexis should awaken? She would go to bed. Perhaps she might sleep. She felt as though she had been beaten from head to foot. The despatch box lay open on the hearthrug, the key in the lock. Its secrecy had hitherto been a jest with her. She had sworn it contained locks of hair of Bluebeard victims. He had given out a legend of Secret Service documents of vast importance. Now it was obvious that, at any rate, it was the repository of the little black book. She hesitated on the threshold. Her instinct of order forbade her to leave the despatch box open and the book trailing about the floor. She would lock the book up in it and put the key in one of Alexis’s pockets. But when, having picked up the small leather box and carried it to the desk, she prepared to do this, a name written on a common piece of paper half in print—an official form—stared brutally at her. And there were others underneath. And reading them she learned the complete official history of John Briggs, Able Seaman, from the time of his joining the Armoured Column in Russia to his discharge, after his mine-sweeper had been torpedoed in the North Sea. Olivia, her dark hair falling about the shoulders of her heliotrope wrap, sat in her husband’s writing-chair, staring at him with tragic eyes as he slept, his brown hair carelessly sweeping his pale brow, and kept a ghastly vigil. CHAPTER XVI