"You wish Good to come professionally?"
"Yes, as soon as possible."
Mayne understood the significance of the invitation. He was not prepared to meet this emergency, forewarned though he had always been. He mopped his brow. His hair was now entirely gray, but he was still ruddy of complexion and possessed a boy's vigor of body. A chill fear passed over him, not only for Hilda, but for himself.
"Lanfair has requested me to bring you to Harrisburg," he explained to Dr. Good. "I anticipate some serious development. I had begun to believe my fears to be groundless." He mopped his forehead again. "It is distressing. I judge there has been some acute crisis, but when I called her to announce our prospective visit—I suggested to Lanfair that I do that—her voice sounded natural."
He had a moment with Stephen upon their arrival and reported the result of his interview to Dr. Good—whispered it, though they were alone in Good's bedroom with the door closed. His alarm grew hourly stronger. One of his aunts had become violent, had lived for several years in an asylum, and had at last put an end to her life.
"It seems that Hilda has taken an intense dislike to a half-blind, middle-aged woman in Lanfair's office and resented the fact that he felt it professionally necessary to remain here to watch this woman's eyes when she wished him to accompany her away. She is known to have taken ammonia from the household supplies the day before ammonia was put into this Miss MacVane's eye-wash. The woman is a harmless lonely soul whom Lanfair saved from blindness."
Dr. Good shook his head. He was a small man remarkable for his bright eyes, his large steel-rimmed spectacles, and a strong Pennsylvania German accent which he would never lose.
"If a homicidal mania is developing, as frequently happens in such cases," he said, "she should be confined at once. Lanfair should be persuaded of the necessity for it. She should be got quietly to the King Sanatorium."
Dr. Good was secretly glad that the problem of transportation was not his. He remembered that Lanfair had been comparatively a poor man—he had paid dearly for his riches!
The problem of transportation proved to be, however, quite simple. Hilda greeted her guests at dinner. It was a season when dress patterns were scant and she wore little, but her slender body appeared to be inadequate to sustain even her bright, filmy dress and her string of pearls. She seemed to be becoming as ethereal as the smoke of the cigarettes which she so constantly used. Dr. Good was quick to observe that she was suspicious and uneasy, that she seemed to be under great tension. It was by no means improbable that a crisis was at hand.