The doctor bent forward, and looked at her keenly: "I should like to ask you another question, Mrs. Crofton. Have you in your past life ever had some very painful association with a dog—I mean any very peculiar experience with a terrier?"
The colour receded from her face. She was so surprised that she hardly knew what to answer.
"I don't think so. My first experience of a really disagreeable kind was when that boy's terrier flew at me. It's true that I've always had a peculiar dislike to dogs—at least for a long time," she corrected herself hastily. She added after a moment's pause, "I expect you know that Colonel Crofton bred dogs?"
"Aye, and that very dog, Flick, was bred by your husband—isn't that so?"
"I believe he was."
She was wondering anxiously why he asked her this question, and her mind all at once flew off to Piper and Mrs. Piper, and she felt sick with fear.
"I ask you these questions," said the doctor very deliberately, "because, according to Mrs. Tosswill, Timmy thinks, or says he thinks, that you are always accompanied by—well, how can I put it?—by a phantom dog."
"A phantom dog?"
She stared at him with her large dark eyes, and then, all at once, she remembered Dandy, her husband's terrier, who, after his master's tragic death, had refused all food, and had howled so long and so dismally that, in a fit of temper, she had herself ordered him to be destroyed.
She lay back on her pretty, frilled pillow, and covered her face with the hand belonging to the arm that was uninjured.