"I was as wide awake, sir, as I am now. I had just got home from Ketler's. I can't think what it was I did see," added Jolly, dropping her voice.
"You saw nothing," was the decisive answer--and in the doctor's tone there was some slight touch of anger. "Fancy plays tricks with the best of us: it must have played you one last night."
"I have been thinking whether it was possible that--that--she was not really dead, sir," persisted Jelly. "Whether she could have got up, and----"
"Be silent, Jelly. I cannot listen to this folly," came the stern interruption. "You have no right to let your imagination run away with you, and then talk of it as reality. I desire that you will never speak another word upon the subject to me; or to any one."
Jelly's green eyes seem to have borrowed the doctor's bewildered look. She gazed into his face. This was a most curious business: she could not see as yet the faintest gleam of a solution to it.
"It was surely her I saw on the landing, sir, dead or alive. I could swear to it. Such things have been heard of before now as swoons being mistaken for death. When poor Mrs. Rane was left alone after her death--that is, her supposed death--if she revived; and got up; and came out upon the landing----"
"Hold your tongue," interposed the doctor, sharply. "How dare you persist in this nonsense, woman! You must be mad or dreaming. An hour before the time you speak of, my poor wife, dead and cold, was where she is now--fastened down in her shell."
He abruptly left the room with an indignant movement; leaving Jelly speechless with horror.
"Fastened down," ran her thoughts, "at twelve o'clock--dead and cold--and I saw her on the landing at one! Oh, my goodness, what does it mean?"