She commenced to struggle in the grasp of the policeman. Abruptly she went limp and her efforts ceased. Garth nodded with satisfaction.
"That's better. She's fainted. Carry her to her room. We'll have a doctor right away to go down town with her."
Reed touched his arm timidly. His husky voice was scarcely audible.
"I understand now. Once or twice this afternoon I've wondered, but she told me that Taylor had lied, that she had never been to California, that he had kept her a prisoner here because in his sick, morbid way he was jealous of me. In any case I would have done anything to help her over the next day or two, for you must understand I've loved her very deeply and for a long time—"
Garth turned away, because he didn't care to see the man's tears.
Later the humility of Nora's interest amused Garth. He told her frankly how the pivotal pieces of the puzzle had been within reach long before Reed had tried in Mrs. Taylor's service to recover and destroy the tell-tale black gown.
"Those sedatives in Taylor's bathroom," he said. "The man's perpetual questioning of his doctor about the symptoms and the treatment of insanity, the moans which frightened the other servants without affecting McDonald or his daughter, the old lady's exaggeration of her eccentricities to draw my attention from Mrs. Taylor—any of these clues ought to have reminded us, Nora, of the hundreds of similar cases in New York of fond relatives who, through a mistaken pride, hide and treat in their own homes such cases of mental disorder."
He scarcely needed to outline for her the picture, filled in by the old lady, of that black hour last night in the melancholy house, when Mrs. Taylor had tricked McDonald's daughter—a competent trained nurse—had escaped from the attic sick-room, and had got the revolver. Garth saw that Nora, too, could fancy Taylor's panic and self-reproach as he lay sick and helpless in bed, knowing his wife was free, foreseeing inevitably much the sort of thing that had happened, trying when it was too late to confess his mistake, to warn the authorities that his wife was at large and, possibly, dangerous.
"But she didn't give him time to write enough," Garth said. "She followed too quickly her ruling impulse to punish the man she blamed for her tragic situation. Moreover, the realization of what she had done, as is common in such cases, returned her to approximate sanity, suggested, even without her mother's prompting, Taylor's California blind as a road from her dreadful dilemma. And McDonald's daughter, through her fright and a promise of money, could be persuaded to avoid arousing her father or Clara, to throw on one of Mrs. Taylor's dresses, to hurry with her to Albany. Evidently the girl lost her nerve, for she was to have come back as if nothing had happened. She was to have taken care of Mrs. Taylor. Eventually she was to have placed her in a sanitarium, explaining her breakdown, as well as any present peculiarities, naturally enough through the shock of her husband's suicide. It was McDonald's demands to know what had happened to his daughter that made Mrs. Taylor turn on him finally. If he had been able to speak then I think he would have broken faith with his dead master and told us the truth about her condition."
"Is there any hope for her?" Nora asked.