CHAPTER XV.
I AM CALLED FOR CONSULTATION.
The incident was certainly a puzzling one, for when, a few minutes later, my chief entered the study, his face, usually ashen grey, was flushed with excitement.
“I’ve been having trouble with a lunatic,” he explained, after greeting me, and inquiring why I had come down to consult him. “The woman’s people are anxious to place her under restraint; yet, for the present, there is not quite sufficient evidence of insanity to sign the certificate. Did you overhear her in the next room?” And, seating himself at his table, he looked at me through his glasses with those keen penetrating eyes that age had not dimmed or time dulled.
“I heard voices,” I admitted, “that was all.” The circumstance was a strange one, and those words were so ominous that I was determined not to reveal to him the conversation I had overheard.
“Like many other women patients suffering from brain troubles, she has taken a violent dislike to me, and believes that I’m the very devil in human form,” he said, smiling. “Fortunately, she had a friend with her, or she might have attacked me tooth and nail just now,” and leaning back in his chair he laughed at the idea—laughed so lightly that my suspicions were almost disarmed.
But not quite. Had you been in my place you would have had your curiosity and suspicion aroused to no mean degree—not only by the words uttered by the woman and Sir Bernard’s defiant reply, but also by the fact that the female voice sounded familiar.
A man knows the voice of his love above all. The voice that I had heard in that adjoining room was, to the best of my belief, that of Ethelwynn.