Chapter III: Part 3

Ivy Lexton, and one of her young married women friends, Janet Horley, were lunching together at the Embassy Club.

Every place in the great room was occupied. At the next table an American diplomat was being lunched by one of the younger Ministers of the Crown; and close by a popular actor-manager was entertaining a pretty young duchess. Two sisters, who had just leapt into musical comedy fame, were laughing at the top of their voices, while being gaily chaffed by their host, an elderly peer who had entertained two generations of charming women by the daring quality of his wit.

Olive Larnoch? Ivy gazed eagerly across at a couple sitting at right angles from where she sat herself.

“Look at her string of pearls studded with huge diamonds! They’re all real!” went on Mrs. Horley excitedly. “As for the emerald Jock Larnoch gave her the day they became engaged, it’s worth five thousand pounds----”

“I’m sure I’ve seen her before,” exclaimed Ivy.

“Of course you must have often seen her, in the old days, when she was Olive Ryde, a war widow without a bob----”

“--and a stocking-shop in North Bolton Street?”

“You’ve got it in one! And her stockings always laddered, too. Well, one evening, she met a Scotch man of business here at the Embassy, named Jock Larnoch. He’d never been in a night-club before, so I suppose it went to his head! I happen to know the people who brought him here, and the funny thing is that they hadn’t an idea he was made of money. They just thought him comfortably off. Yet his first love-gift to Olive was a Baby Rolls--she didn’t know what to do with it, poor dear!”

Ivy gazed with absorbed interest at the fortunate bride of the Scotch millionaire. How marvellous it must be to have everything one wants, including an adoring husband! She sighed a quick, bitter little secret sigh. The sight of this fortunate young woman had brought back to her poignant memories and a sudden realisation of what her life might be now, had she been, a few weeks ago, what Miles Rushworth called “free.”

“Is that nice-looking man her spouse?”

“Heavens, no! That’s Bob Crickle, who wrote the book of _T’wee-t’we_. Jock Larnoch spends every other week ‘at the works’; there never was such a lucky girl as Olive!”

Again, with a sensation almost of despair, Ivy thought of Rushworth, and of all that he might have meant in her life by now if he hadn’t been so--so old-fashioned and queer in his ideas.

The Lextons had been settled down in London for nearly two months, and Jervis was going to Rushworth’s City office each morning. As for Ivy, she was once more a popular member of the happy-go-lucky, while for the most part financially solid, set with whom she had danced, played bridge, lunched, and supped through life, in the days when she and her husband were still living on what remained of Jervis’s fortune.

But woman does not live by amusement alone. Ivy loved being loved, so she had “made it up” with Roger Gretorex.

Rushworth was far away, and though he wrote to her by every mail, his letters, as she sometimes pettishly told herself, might have been read aloud at Charing Cross. So it was that, though she had really done with Gretorex, she still went, now and again, to Ferry Place, but far less often than in the days when she had been utterly down on her luck, and at odds with Fate.

And yet, though the Lextons’ troubles seemed over, black care was again beginning to dog Ivy’s light footsteps, for she was once more what she called, to herself, very hard up.

True, the couple were now living in what appeared to Ivy’s husband extreme comfort, and even luxury. Not only was their flat one of the best in the fine block called the Duke of Kent Mansion, charmingly furnished; but an excellent cook, and a good day-maid had been left there by Miles Rushworth’s cousins. So what might have been called the Lextons’ home-life ran as if on wheels.

From the moment, however, that Ivy had come back to London, secure in the knowledge that her husband was now earning a thousand pounds a year, paid monthly, she had again fallen into the way of buying, or, better still, of ordering on account, any pretty costly trifle, any becoming frock or hat, that took her fancy. She also, in a way that seemed modest to herself, had at once begun to entertain.

It was such fun to give lively little luncheon parties to her women friends--lunch being followed as often as not by bridge! One, sometimes even two, bridge tables would be set out in the attractive drawing-room and, in due course, a bountiful tea would be served by the smiling day-maid, for those of Ivy’s guests who were not afraid of getting fat.

The good-natured old cook had not been used to so much work, and she had very soon declared, not unreasonably, that she must have extra help in the kitchen.

Lexton, who was rather pathetically anxious “to make good,” always went down to the City each morning by the Underground. But he came back by omnibus, and he invariably dropped in at his club on his way home, and, as he was an open-hearted fellow, he often asked one of his new business acquaintances to drop in too. That, also, meant entertaining, but on a far more modest scale than that in which Ivy indulged.

Though Mrs. Jervis Lexton had learnt long ago the fine art of living on credit, there are a great many things which even in London a prosperous young couple with a good address cannot obtain, as it were, for nothing. Each week many pounds slipped through pretty, popular Ivy’s fingers, and she honestly could not have told you how or why. So it was inevitable that she should again begin to feel short of money--short, even, of petty cash.

Often she told herself that it was maddening to feel that if Rushworth were in England she could almost certainly have had all the money she needed, and that without too great a sacrifice of her pride, or, what was far more important, his good opinion of her. Just before leaving for South Africa he had given her a hundred pounds as “a birthday gift.” How good he was, how generous! Her heart thrilled with real gratitude when she thought of Miles Rushworth.

Late in the same day that his wife had lunched at the Embassy Club, Lexton, who was going out to what he called a stag party that evening, came back from the City to find an unpleasantly threatening letter, this time from a tailor to whom he had owed for years a huge bill, and who had evidently just heard of his new-found prosperity.

For once Ivy’s husband looked ruffled and cross, and she, also for once, felt very angry indeed. Jervis had begun, so she told herself with rage, to put on airs, just because he had a job--a job that she was too clever and tactful ever to remind him was entirely owing to her friendship with his employer.

At last he left the flat and, with a feeling of relief, she went off, too, by omnibus, to the tiny house where Roger Gretorex lived and practised his profession. It was in what might have been called a slum, though each of the mid-Victorian, two-storied, cottage-like dwellings were now inhabited by decent working people and their families.

Ivy had not been to No. 6 Ferry Place for nearly a fortnight, and her lover had written her a long, reproachful letter, imploring her to come and see him there, if for only a few moments. It made him feel so wretched, so he wrote, never to see her now, except in the company of people and in surroundings which filled him with contemptuous dislike, or, in a sense worse still, only in the presence of her husband.

When everything was going well with Ivy Lexton, she felt bored, often even irritated, with Roger Gretorex and his great love for her. But the moment she was under the weather and worried, as she was again beginning to be, then she found it a comfort to be with a man who not only worshipped her, but who never wanted her to make any effort to amuse or flatter him, as did all the other men with whom she was now once more thrown in contact.

So it was that this late afternoon, immediately after Jervis had left the flat, she telephoned and told the enraptured Gretorex that as she happened to have this evening free, she would come and have dinner with him at Ferry Place.

And yet, as she sat in the almost empty omnibus on her way to Westminster, her heart and her imagination were full of Miles Rushworth, and not once did she even throw a fleeting thought to the man she was going to see. Gretorex had become to Ivy Lexton what she had once heard a friend of hers funnily describe as a kind of “Stepney” to her husband. Sometimes she felt that she really preferred Jervis to Roger. Jervis was so kindly, easygoing, unexacting.

Still to-night she felt cross with Jervis, because of the scrap they had had over the tailor’s bill, so the thought of secret revenge was sweet.

But the image securely throned in her inmost heart was that of Miles Rushworth.

The knowledge that Rushworth, a man possessed of great, to her imagination limitless, wealth, was loving her, longing for her, and yet, owing to his oversensitive, absurdly scrupulous, conscience, hopelessly out of her reach, awoke in Ivy Lexton a feeling of fierce, passionate exasperation.

At last she stepped lightly out of the omnibus, the conductor, and an old gentleman who had been her only fellow-passenger, eagerly assisting her. She smiled at them both. Even the most trifling tribute to her beauty always gave her a touch of genuine pleasure. She was looking very pretty to-night in a charming frock, and in her hand she held the curious little bolster bag which Rushworth had bought for her at Dieppe.

Eight o’clock boomed from Big Ben, and Roger Gretorex, his arm round Ivy’s shoulder, led her into the tiny dining-room, where had been prepared in haste an attractive little meal. She had been what the man who loved her with so devoted and absorbing a passion, called “kind,” and he felt happy and at peace.

After they had finished dinner they sat on at table for a while, and, as she looked across at him, Ivy told herself that her lover was indeed a splendid-looking man--a man many a woman would envy her.

“Sometimes,” he said in a low voice, “I dream such a wonderful dream, my dearest. I dreamt it last night----”

She looked at him roguishly. “Tell me your dream!”

“I dreamt that you were free, and that we were married, you and I----”

She made no answer to that remark, only shook her head, a little pettishly. For one thing, she always felt a trifle cross, as well as bored, when Gretorex talked in what she called to herself a sloppy, sentimental way. Could he seriously suppose that, if she had the good fortune to be what he called “free,” she would marry a poverty-stricken doctor who was forced to live and work in a slum? He evidently did suppose that; and the fact that he did so made her feel uncomfortable.

“I don’t set out to be particularly good, Roger, but I do think it awfully wrong to talk like that!”

He said slowly, “I agree, it is.”

“It makes me feel I oughtn’t to come and see you like this, in your own house. Jervis would be very much put out if he knew I ever came here.”

Gretorex, wincing inwardly, made no answer to that observation. Sometimes this woman, who was all his life, would say something that made him experience a violent feeling of recoil.

She had got up as she spoke, and with a sensation of relief she put on her hat. It was still early, and she had suddenly remembered an amusing bachelor girl named Judy Swinston, who lived not far from here, in Queen Anne’s Mansions. Judy had said that she was always at home after dinner on Thursdays, so why shouldn’t she, Ivy, go along there now? She could telephone from a call office to find out if it was really true that the Bohemian crowd who formed Judy Swinston’s circle didn’t bother to dress.

In some ways Ivy Lexton was very conventional. She would have disliked making part of any gathering which could be called a party, in her present day-frock and walking shoes, charming as were both the frock and the shoes. It was a perfect St. Martin’s summer evening, more like June than the first of November.

“You’re not going yet?” asked Gretorex, in a tone almost of anguish.

“Jervis said he’d try and be back by half-past ten, so I knew I’d have to be home early.”

“I see. All right. You won’t mind my walking with you a little way?”

And then she turned and faced him, angry at his obtuseness. How utterly selfish men were!

“I should mind--mind very much indeed! Whenever we’ve left the place together, I’ve always felt uncomfortable. Taxis go all sorts of ways nowadays--just to make their fares bigger, I suppose. The other day a taxi brought Jervis and me down close here, past the end of this street, though it was quite out of our way. I should hate it, if he met us walking together at this time of night. He would think it so queer.”

Again he said sorely, “I see. All right.”

Suddenly there came the sound of raucous cries echoing down Ferry Place.

“… Verdict in the Branksome Case.… All the winners!”

“I thought they weren’t allowed to cry papers now?” said Ivy, as the shouts drew nearer and nearer.

“They cry them down here. As for the Branksome Case, to my mind the verdict is a foregone conclusion. The man will hang, and they’ll let the woman off--though she ought to hang too!”

“A lot of people were talking about the Branksome mystery where I was lunching to-day,” exclaimed Ivy. “I knew nothing about it, so I felt rather a fool. The truth is, I’m not a bit interested in murders, Roger. I think it’s morbid to want to know about such things.”

“Do you, darling? Then I’m afraid I’m morbid. This Branksome Case is of peculiar interest to every medical man, owing to the simple fact that there is a great deal of secret poisoning going on nowadays.”

“What a horrid idea!” And Ivy Lexton did indeed think it very horrid.

“Horrid, no doubt. But I’m afraid unquestionably true. In fact I heard the question put only the other day, as to what a doctor ought to do if he suspects anything of the sort is going on?”

She looked at him with a certain curiosity. “What would you do, Roger?”

“I’ve never been able to make up my mind. Of course, this Branksome story was complicated by the fact that two were in it--a husband and a wife. They’d got everything they could out of the woman’s lover, so they made up their minds to do away with him. They were awfully clever, and it’s a marvel they were ever found out.”

“How did they do it?” she asked, eager at last.

“With arsenic--fly papers.”

“Fly papers?”

He laughed. “Wonderful what people will do sometimes, isn’t it? Steeping fly papers in water has long been a common way of ridding oneself of a tiresome husband. There’s arsenic in almost everything we use--at least, that’s what’s said.”

“Arsenic?” Ivy pronounced the word very carefully. It was a new word in her limited vocabulary.

He smiled across at her. Every moment of her presence was precious to him, so he talked on, eager too. “There’s plenty of the stuff in my surgery, at any rate. It’s a splendid tonic, as well as a poison.”

“What a funny thing!” and she smiled at him, apparently rather amused at the notion.

Looking back, for even Ivy Lexton looked back now and again to certain crucial moments of her life, she realised it must have been at that very moment that a certain as yet vague and formless plan slipped into her mind.

“As a matter of fact,” Gretorex smiled back at her, “I’ve got to make up and send off this very evening a mixture which will contain arsenic----”

“I must be off now,” Ivy said, a thought regretfully.

They walked down the short passage, and through the two doors which separated the house from the surgery. Once there he turned up the light. Anything--anything to keep her a few moments longer in his company!

He went quickly across from the door to the left corner of the bare, low-ceilinged room, now his surgery, which had once been an outhouse. There he unlocked the cupboard where he kept his dangerous drugs, and lifted down a jar on which was printed on a red label the word “Arsenic.” Placing it on a deal table above which was a hanging bookcase, he exclaimed, “If you would like to see, darling, what----”

And then there came a thunderous knock at the front door of the tiny house.

“Wait one moment! Don’t go yet, dearest,” he said hastily. “I won’t be a minute!”

He rushed away, though even in his haste he did not forget to shut both the doors which separated the surgery from the rest of the house.

Ivy Lexton gave a quick look round the sordid-looking stone-flagged walled space, through which her eager little feet had so often carried her last winter, at a time when she had been in love, really in love, with Roger Gretorex.

She noted that there was no blind to the little square window. But, even in the unlikely event of anyone looking in through that window, no one standing outside could see, while she stood by the table, what she was doing, or was about to do.

Standing very still, she listened. From the consulting-room at the other end of the passage there came the sound of voices, raised in argument.

Hesitatingly she took up the jar Gretorex had placed on the table. Then she looked at it with avid curiosity. How strange and exciting to know that Death was in that jar--prisoned, but ready to escape and become the servant of any quick-witted, determined human being.

When, at last, she put the jar down again, she noticed what she had not seen till now, that a glass spoon lay on the table.

Once more she looked round the bare surgery. Once more she listened intently, only to hear again Gretorex’s voice, far away, raised in argument.

All at once and in feverish haste she began unscrewing the top of the jar. Once this was achieved, she pressed the jewelled top of her bolster bag, and as it sprang open, she took her powder puff out of its _pochette_. Then, taking the glass spoon off the table, with its help she began shaking into the little white leather-lined pocket a quantity of the powder which she knew to be a deadly poison.

After snapping-to the bag, she replaced its cap on the jar labelled “Arsenic” and screwed it tight. Then she stepped back from the table a little way, and stood quite still, thinking of what she had just done.

Why had she done that--to herself she called it “funny” thing? Deep in her heart she knew quite well the answer to her own wordless question. But she did not admit her purpose, even to herself.

All at once she heard sounds just behind her--the sounds made by slippered, shuffling feet.

Filled with a sudden shock of sick terror, she turned slowly round to see Roger Gretorex’s old charwoman, Mrs. Huntley, standing uncertainly in the middle of the room.

The woman had evidently let herself in from the back alley with a latchkey. But how long had she been here? And how much had she seen?

“Why, Mrs. Huntley,” said Ivy in a shaken voice. “You did startle me!”

“Did I, ma’am? I beg your pardon, I’m sure. I just come in to see if the doctor wanted anything,” the old woman spoke in a pleasant, refined voice.

“He’ll be here in a minute----”

“I won’t disturb him now, ma’am. I’ll come in later.”

Opening the door through which she had entered, she slipped through it into the gathering darkness. Then she shut the door noiselessly behind her.

Ivy moved again close to the deal table. She felt violently disturbed, even terrified. Yet the old woman had looked absolutely placid, though a little taken aback at finding a lady where she had expected to see nobody, excepting maybe her employer, and him only if he were engaged in making up medicines.

Hardly knowing what she was doing, Ivy Lexton glanced up at the row of books in the shabby little bookcase above the table by which she was standing, and she saw that among them was one entitled, “Poisons.”

She was just about to take it down when she heard quick footsteps in the short passage, and Gretorex opened the surgery door.

“I won’t be more than a few moments now! You will stay, my dearest, won’t you, till I’ve done with this chap?”

“Of course I will. Don’t hurry,” she answered, in a soft, kindly tone.

She took down the book and hurriedly she turned to the index.

Yes! Here was the word she sought. There were a number of references--half a dozen at least--and she turned up, “Effects of Arsenic; page 154.”

A famous case of secret poisoning was quoted, with every detail set out, and she read it with intense, absorbed interest. It told her what she had so much wanted to know, and feared to ask Roger Gretorex, how a secret poisoner went to work, and also how long the process took before--before--even to herself she did not end the question.…

As she put the volume back on the bookshelf her mind travelled into the future--the now possible, now probable, future.

Standing there, in Gretorex’s barely furnished surgery, she saw herself the cherished wife of Miles Rushworth, and not only rich beyond the dreams of even her desire, but also secure from every conceivable earthly ill.

Had Ivy Lexton belonged to another generation, she would doubtless have called what had just happened to herself “providential.” As it was, she just thought it a piece of astounding, almost incredible, good luck.

She next took down from the shelf a thin little book dealing with infantile paralysis. But she had only just time to open it, and to glance, with a feeling of shrinking distaste, at one of the illustrations, when Gretorex burst into the surgery. “The poor chap’s gone at last! What are you reading, darling?”

“A book about children, dear.”

There came a pathetic look into her eyes, and Gretorex gently took the thin volume from her hand. Then he kissed that lovely, soft little hand.

She had told him, very early in their acquaintance, that her husband hated the idea of children, as if they had a child it would surely interfere with the kind of idle, gay life that he, Jervis, loved. For the hundredth time Gretorex cursed Lexton for a heartless brute.

She allowed him to take her in his arms. For a few moments they clung together, and she kissed him with real passion, responding as she had not responded for what seemed to Gretorex an eternity of frustrate longing.

Ivy had been frightened, very much frightened, just now. It was surprisingly comfortable and reassuring to feel his strong arms round her, to know that he loved her--loved her.

“Did you buy an evening paper?” she asked at last, disengaging herself from his close embrace.

“No, but the chap who came to see me had one in his hand, and I believe he left it behind. Would you like me to give it you to read in the omnibus?”

“It would hurt my eyes to do that. I was only wondering what had happened about that Branksome Case?”

“I can tell you that without looking at the paper, darling. In fact I did tell you--but you’ve forgotten, my pet.”

“What was it that you told me?”

“That they’ll hang the man, and let the woman off!”

He spoke quite confidently. “There’s not a doubt but that she really planned the whole thing out. But he, poor wretch, bought the fly papers. Most of the secret poisoning that goes on is done by women.”

“How dreadful!”

“A great many dreadful things go on in this strange world, my darling love.”

“You mean things that are not found out?”

He nodded, almost gaily. He was glad, so glad, to find a subject that interested her, and that might make her stay a few moments longer.

So, “I’m afraid that only one secret poisoner is found out for six that go scot free,” he went on. “Even now it’s difficult to tell the difference between the effect produced by, say, arsenic, and a very ordinary ailment. A post-mortem only takes place if there’s already reason to suspect foul play.”

“Post-mortem?”

The word meant nothing to Ivy Lexton.

“In the vast majority of cases the danger is negligible,” he continued. “The secret poisoner, especially if a woman, is never even suspected, and if she is----”

“If she is?” echoed Ivy uncertainly.

“The doctor, nine times out of ten, gives her the benefit of the doubt!”

He ended his careless sentence with a laugh. It was of her, of her dear nearness, of her kind, soft, loving manner, that he was thinking, and not at all of what he was saying.

“Would you let her off, Roger?”

He grew suddenly grave. “Well, no, I don’t think I would. You see it wouldn’t be right. For one thing, she might try the same game over again.”

She looked at him coldly. Few men were as set on doing right as was apparently this man.

Then she smiled, a curiously subtle, sweet little smile. She knew, if no one else did, the weak place in his defences. It was pleasant to know that no other woman would ever have that knowledge. Ivy believed, rightly or wrongly, that a man does not love twice as this man, Gretorex, loved her.

“Well, I must go now,” she said at last. And then, for she saw the sudden darkening of his face, “You may as well come with me as far as the corner of Great Smith Street, Roger. It’s quite dark now.”

Once more she allowed him to kiss her. Once more there came from her the response which had now for so long been lacking, and of which the lack made him feel so desolate.

As they walked along the now shrouded, deserted little back streets of old Westminster, Ivy Lexton was very gentle in her manner to the man who loved her with so whole-hearted and selfless a devotion.

She had quite decided that soon they must part, never to meet again. And yet, though Gretorex would never know it, it was to him, albeit indirectly, that she would owe her splendid freedom, and all that freedom was to bring to her. It was that knowledge, maybe, that made her manner so gentle and so kind.

When at last Jervis Lexton came in, he found his wife playing patience in the pretty sitting-room where she spent so little of her time.

He felt a little surprised, for unless she happened to be out, as was the case six nights out of seven, Ivy always went to bed early.

“Thank God, I’m safe home again!” he exclaimed. “It was the most awful show. The grub wasn’t bad, but the champagne was like syrup. I’ve ‘some thirst,’ I can tell you!”

“Wait a minute, and”--she smiled a gay little smile--“I’ll mix you a highball, old boy. Would you like a Bizzy Izzy, just as a treat?”

“The answer, ma’am, is ‘yes’!”

She went off into the dining-room, and took from the fine old mahogany brass-bound wine-cooler a bottle of rye whisky and a bottle of sherry. Then, carefully, she poured a small wineglass of each into a tall glass.

With the glass in her hand she hurried down the passage, and so into the bright, clean, empty kitchen. There she soon found some ice, and, after having chipped off a number of small pieces, she waited a moment and listened intently, for she did not want to be surprised in what she was about to do.

But the old cook was lying sound asleep in the bedroom which lay beyond the kitchen. Ivy could even hear her long, drawn-out snores.

Opening a cupboard door very, very quietly, she found a syphon, and filled up the glass almost to the top with soda-water. Then, quickly, she mixed in with a clean wooden spoon a good pinch of the powder she had secreted in the _pochette_ of her bag.

“A perfect Bizzy Izzy!” Ivy called out gaily as she swiftly went down the corridor, holding in her steady hand the tall glass, now full almost to the brim.

Through the hall and back into the sitting-room she hurried, and then she watched, with an odd sensation of excitement, her husband toss off the delicious iced drink.

“This soda fizz has got a bitter tang to it,” he exclaimed, “but it’s none the worse for that!”

Ivy stayed awake for a long time that night. She had suddenly begun to feel afraid, she hardly knew of what. But at last she dropped off to sleep.

At nine o’clock the next morning she awoke. What was it that had happened last night? Then she remembered.

Leaping out of bed she rushed across the dressing-table, on which there lay the mother-of-pearl bolster bag she had had out with her last night. Opening it she took out her handkerchief, her powder puff, and her purse. Then she put the bag, now quite empty save for the white powder the tiny white leather-lined inner recess contained, into an old despatch-box which had belonged to her father.

It was the only “lock up” Ivy Lexton possessed; at no time of her life had she been so foolish as to keep dangerous love-letters more than a very short time. She put the despatch-box in what was the empty half of a huge Victorian inlaid wardrobe. Then she got into bed again, and rang the bell.

A moment later the day-maid opened the bedroom door.

“Mr. Lexton was ill in the night, ma’am. He thinks he ate something last evening that didn’t agree with him. He asked me to tell you that he’s not going to the office this morning.”

Chapter Six

It was the eighth of November, a day which, though she never realised it, altered the whole of Ivy Lexton’s life. And this was the more extraordinary because she was usually quick enough to realise the importance of everything that concerned herself.

But on this day she was feeling secretly excited, anxious, and what to herself she called “nervy,” for her husband’s illness, though it had only lasted just over a week, seemed to her intolerably long-drawn-out.

Jervis Lexton, poor devil, was putting up a grim, instinctive fight for life. Coming of a long line of sporting, out-of-door, country squires and their placid wives, he was magnificently healthy, hard-bitten, and possessed of reserves of physical strength on which he was now drawing daily larger and larger drafts.

On the morning when she had first been told that Jervis had been taken ill in the night, Ivy had gone down to Rushworth’s city office. There, as she put it afterwards when telling the invalid of her interview with Mr. James, the man he called his boss, “red carpets had been put down for her,” and no difficulty at all had been made as to Lexton’s staying away.

As a matter of fact, the young man had very soon been sized up as being, from a business point of view, hopeless. But his pleasant, easy manners, and his inexhaustible fund of small talk and of good stories, amused the boss. Also--and that, naturally, was the one thing that mattered--Jervis Lexton was a pet of Miles Rushworth.

After Mrs. Jervis Lexton’s visit to the office, however, what had seemed a mystery had been at any rate partially explained. What man, so Rushworth’s London agent asked himself smiling, could resist that deliciously pretty and sweet-mannered little woman? No wonder a job had been invented for her husband, who was, after all, a decent chap.

A day was to come when Mr. James would try to remember how Ivy Lexton had impressed him, and when all he would succeed in remembering, very vividly, was how agreeable that impression had been, and how touchingly the lovely lady had revealed her devotion to her husband, fortunate Jervis Lexton.

On the second day Jervis had said he felt so queer that he would like to see their old friend, Dr. Lancaster. And by now, after five days, that genial general practitioner, though utterly unsuspicious of the truth, was nevertheless becoming slightly uneasy at the persistence of the illness.

He had insisted, much against Ivy’s will, on sending in a nurse, a placid, kindly woman named Bradfield, who had often nursed for the doctor before.

Small wonder that the patient’s wife was also becoming just a little fretful, and more than a little anxious. How long, she often asked herself restlessly, was her ordeal going to last?

Yet another fact added to Ivy Lexton’s discomfort during those long days of waiting.

That fact, or rather problem, concerned Roger Gretorex. She found it increasingly difficult to prevent him from coming to the flat. When alone with her he made no secret of his dislike of meeting her husband on “Hail fellow, well met!” terms, and yet he longed to be with her every moment of his scanty leisure.

At times she felt she almost hated him, for by now her whole mind was filled with the thought of Rushworth, and of all that she felt convinced Rushworth was going to mean in her life. But she could not yet afford to break with Gretorex. Afford, indeed, was still the right word, for again he was supplying her with what had always been to Ivy the staff of life--petty cash.

But she came to one great resolution, and that was to go no more to the humble little house in the Westminster slum with which she had now a secret, terrifying association. And so, as her slightest wish was law to Gretorex, the two began meeting now in a picture gallery, or, when it was a fine day, in Kensington Gardens, which was conveniently near the charming flat the Lextons owed to the generous kindness of Miles Rushworth.

So far Ivy had managed to conceal her husband’s illness from Gretorex. With regard to that mysterious illness, it was of her lover, and of her lover alone, that up to now she had felt afraid.

As a matter of fact Roger Gretorex had already completely forgotten that idle talk of theirs concerning the Branksome poisoning mystery. But every word that had been uttered during the evening when she had had supper at Ferry Place, and every moment that she had spent in the surgery, remained uncannily present to Ivy’s mind.

And now, on this eighth of November, she had been out for an hour, looking into the shop windows which line Kensington High Street. She had even gone into one famous emporium and bought a new, and very expensive, black model hat. Though quite unobtrusive in shape, it was at once as simple and as unusual as only a French model hat can be. She had felt that she might have cause to be really very much put out if that perfect little hat were bought, over her head so to speak, during the next few days.

At last, feeling more cheerful, she walked briskly back to the Duke of Kent Mansion. The pleasant-spoken porter--all men, even lift porters, were always pleasant-spoken to Ivy Lexton--took her up in the lift. She let herself in with her latchkey, for she always liked slipping in and out of the flat alone.

As she went through the hall towards her charming bedroom, the door of her husband’s room opened, and Nurse Bradfield came out, looking flustered and worried.

“Mr. Lexton doesn’t seem so well, and as we haven’t seen Dr. Lancaster for two days, I telephoned to say I’d like him to come now. But oh, Mrs. Lexton, such a dreadful thing has happened!”

Under her delicately applied rouge, the colour drifted from Ivy’s face.

“Something dreadful?” she repeated mechanically.

“Yes, indeed, for Dr. Lancaster has gone and broken his leg playing golf! He was staying with his brother-in-law at Seaford, for one night only, but now he’s laid up there, and they don’t know for how long.”

Ivy’s first feeling was one of relief. She had been so dreadfully frightened just now lest “something” should have been found out.

But even so, as the nurse went on speaking, there did come over her a slight feeling of misgiving.

“However, Dr. Berwick, the doctor who works in with Dr. Lancaster, so to speak, is coming round instead!” Nurse Bradfield continued.

“I hope he’s nice,” said Ivy earnestly.

The accident to Dr. Lancaster was real bad luck. He was a dear old thing, and so truly fond of her. When they had been almost penniless, he had attended her twice for nothing.

There came a curious look over the nurse’s face. She hesitated, and then made up her mind to be frank.

“To tell you the truth, Mrs. Lexton, I don’t much like Dr. Berwick! But then I’m prejudiced, for I once had a nasty little scrap with him when I was nursing another case for Dr. Lancaster. I consider that Dr. Berwick was very rude to me.”

“How horrid of him!” exclaimed Ivy sympathetically, although she had not really been attending to what Nurse Bradfield was saying.

But she did listen, with startled attention, when the nurse suddenly added:

“However, he’s said to be very clever, and he’s much more up-to-date than Dr. Lancaster. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if Dr. Berwick finds out what really is the matter with Mr. Lexton!”

Ivy stared fearfully at the speaker, and again there swept over her a strong feeling of misgiving, if not of fear.

Thus was effected the entrance of Dr. Berwick into the lives of Ivy Lexton and her husband.

In spite of his shrewdness and long professional experience, it took the new doctor some days to become even vaguely puzzled--so true is it that murder is the one chink in the armour of a civilised community--over certain unusual features in his patient’s case.

On the occasion of his first visit to Jervis Lexton, Dr. Berwick had been in a great hurry, and though he had seen his new patient’s wife for a few moments, he had impatiently dismissed her from his mind as a foolish, frivolous little woman. Indeed, considering the manner of man he was, he could hardly have told, after that brief interview in the dimly lighted hall, whether young Mrs. Lexton was pretty, or just ordinary, though he had noticed, with disapproval, that she was very much made up.

Ivy on her side, if feeling slightly surprised by the doctor’s lack of interest in her attractive self, was at the same time reassured by the fact that Dr. Berwick evidently thought her husband only suffering from a temporary, if obstinate ailment, brought on, most probably, by something he had eaten during the evening which had preceded the night he had first been taken ill.

And yet her feeling of misgiving prevailed so far that she deliberately tried to keep out of the new doctor’s way. This was quite easy, for she was out to most meals, and owing to Lexton’s illness she had stopped giving her pleasant little bridge-parties at the flat.

But as the days dragged on, as Jervis Lexton, instead of responding to treatment, grew steadily worse, Dr. Berwick began to feel really puzzled. He made up his mind one day to see Mrs. Lexton. On that day Ivy was going to be motored to Brighton by a new admirer, and she had said she would come in after lunch to fetch her fur coat. So the doctor, believing she would be back soon, waited for her. But the moments became minutes, and the minutes mounted up to close on half an hour.

Feeling very much annoyed, he was just about to leave the flat, when Ivy walked into the drawing-room, looking, as he instantly acknowledged to himself, charmingly pretty and gay.

“I waited to see you, Mrs. Lexton, because I am not satisfied with your husband’s condition. From what the nurse tells me, Dr. Lancaster was puzzled too, though he said nothing of that in the notes he sent me concerning the case.”

Then, almost in spite of himself, he was touched by the look of distress which at once shadowed her lovely face, and it was in a kinder tone that he went on:

“If he does not pick up in the next day or two, I should very much like to have another opinion. Will you try to persuade him to see a specialist?”

“Of course I will,” she said quickly. “Though he can’t bear any fuss made over him, poor old boy! He very much objected to our having a nurse; but she’s such a comfort to me.”

Dr. Berwick disliked Nurse Bradfield. He thought her slow and old-fashioned. So now he told himself that, though she might be a comfort to Mrs. Lexton, he would far prefer a different kind of nurse to tend one as ill as he now realised Jervis Lexton to be.

He looked fixedly at his patient’s wife, debating within himself whether he ought to impart to her a suspicion which was beginning, only beginning, to touch his mind. Now and again, during the last two days, he had felt a slight, half-doubting suspicion as to whether certain untoward symptoms could possibly mean that Lexton was absorbing some form of irritant poison. But even to hint or half-imply such possibility is a very serious thing to do from a doctor’s point of view, and so he fell back on what seemed the wiser course of recommending a second opinion.

“Do you think Dr. Lancaster will be away long?” asked Ivy. “He’s such an old friend of mine,” and she smiled, a pretty, disarming little smile. “I know you’re ever so much more clever than he is----”

Dr. Berwick interrupted harshly, “That’s quite untrue! Dr. Lancaster has had ten times the experience I’ve had, and I take my hat off to him every time. But I fear he’s not likely to be back for a long time. You see, he’s no longer a young man, and it is a great chance for him to be invalided away from home, and where he can’t be got at by the kind attentions of friends and--patients.”

The next day an untoward thing happened which, though it seemed at the time of very little account, was yet to prove of considerable moment.

Roger Gretorex ran across a Mrs. Horley, whom he had often met in Ivy’s company in the now far-away days when he would go anywhere, and everywhere, just to see her, and to hold her hand for a moment. Mrs. Horley naturally alluded to Jervis Lexton’s illness, and was evidently much surprised to find that it was all news to him. To everyone but Gretorex, Ivy constantly mentioned her husband’s unfortunate condition, and expressed some measure of anxiety.

Though only half believing Mrs. Horley’s tale, or rather believing that Lexton was suffering from some slight indisposition, Gretorex went off to the flat, only to find that Ivy was out, as usual.

The cook had opened the front door. She knew Gretorex quite well by sight, for in the early days of the Lextons being there, he had been an occasional visitor.

He listened to her wordy account of “the master’s” illness; and then the nurse, hearing voices in the hall, opened her patient’s door.

“Nurse! This is Dr. Gretorex, a great friend of the master and missus,” said cook, retreating down the corridor towards her kitchen.

Nurse Bradfield, who found life very dull just now, was pleased to see the fine-looking young man--a doctor, too.

“Will you ask Mr. Lexton if he would care to see me?” asked Gretorex.

He felt he could do nothing less, as he was there, and Ivy was out.

Poor Jervis eagerly, even joyfully, welcomed the suggestion, and the nurse left the two young men together. They talked of all kinds of things--things that interested Lexton rather than Gretorex.

At last the visitor rose. “I’ll be going now----”

“Must you? I get so bored lying here. I wish, old chap, you could think of something that would make me feel the thing again? I don’t think much of Ivy’s Dr. Lancaster. Besides, he’s just broken his leg!”

Then he went into details of what had become his wretched case, and, after having heard him out, Gretorex produced a paper pad and a fountain pen. Rapidly he began writing out a prescription, and he was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not hear the bedroom door open.

Dr. Berwick, who was tired, having been up all night over an anxious case, stared with anger, as well as amazement, at his as yet unknown colleague.

“Hallo!” cried Jervis, trying to lift himself up from the pillow, for he had become very weak. “Here’s a lark! An impromptu consultation, eh?”

Then, as even he realised that Dr. Berwick looked like a thundercloud, as he afterwards expressed it to the nurse, he went on, apologetically: “I was joking of course! Gretorex, this is Dr. Berwick, who has taken over Dr. Lancaster’s patients.”

Then, looking at Berwick, he went on: “Dr. Gretorex is a great friend of mine and Ivy’s. He came in just now, and I told him about my poor dry throat and asked him if he could think of something that might give me a little relief. You don’t mind, do you?”

Dr. Berwick waited a moment. Then he said, in far from a pleasant tone:

“Well, to tell you the truth, I do mind. You are my patient, Mr. Lexton, not Dr. Gretorex’s patient.”

Gretorex rose from the chair on which he had been sitting close to the sick man’s bed. The colour rushed up all over his dark face. He said stiffly, cursing Lexton for a fool the while:

“Mr. Lexton had just told me that Dr. Lancaster has broken his leg. I had no idea that someone else had already taken over the case----”

There followed an awkward silence between the two men. Dr. Berwick was waiting for the formal apology which the other did not consider it necessary to tender to him.

At last Gretorex took the piece of paper on which he had written out a prescription for a soothing mixture and tore it in two.

“Well, Lexton,” he exclaimed, “I’ll be off now, leaving you, I’m sure, in excellent hands! Tell Mrs. Lexton I came in. I’ve been so awfully busy this last fortnight that I haven’t had a minute to myself. I’ve taken over for a friend a practice in Westminster for a bit. It’s in a slum, and means a lot of work----”

“And precious little pay, eh?” said Lexton.

Roger Gretorex smiled grimly, “But it’s all experience.”

Then he went out of the room, with just a cool nod to the other doctor.

It was a very different Dr. Berwick who at eight that same evening finished eating his well-cooked, daintily-served dinner. Janey Berwick was what her husband’s old friends called, with truth, a thoroughly nice woman. After their early marriage she and her husband had had a bitter struggle, but that had only made them come the closer to one another, and now that he was beginning to be really successful, she was determined to make him, so far as lay in her power, comfortable.

She wore to-night her prettiest evening frock, and anyone, seeing them sitting there side by side in front of their cheerful fire in their pleasant sitting-room, would have thought them a pair of engaged lovers, rather than a couple who had been wedded for close on twelve years.

Janey Berwick still looked a young woman, for she had been only nineteen when she had given up a comfortable, even luxurious, home, to throw in her lot with the young man who till two or three months before their wedding had been still a medical student.

He bore more signs than did his wife of the struggle they had gone through. However, that struggle was now a thing of the past, or, at least, so they both had good reason to think.

An intelligent doctor either shares everything or nothing with his wife. Berwick shared everything and now he was engaged in telling her about Jervis Lexton, and how puzzled he was fast becoming over Lexton’s curious condition. He also told her how surprised, not to say indignant, he had been to discover, when he had gone to see his patient to-day, another doctor there, actually prescribing for Lexton--true, only as a friend, but acting, even so, in a most irregular fashion!

“I think I made him feel what I thought of such conduct,” he said with satisfaction.

Then suddenly he asked her a question.

“D’you remember that your people took a shooting in Sussex many years ago, when I first knew you, from a man call Gretorex?”

“Of course I do, darling! Anchorford was the name of the place.”

She was puzzled at the sudden change in the conversation.

“Well, this young chap I found prescribing for Lexton is Roger Gretorex! I had a sort of feeling I’d seen him before.”

“But what an extraordinary thing--I mean, that he should be a doctor.”

“I don’t see why. Only the old house and that bit of shooting belonged to them, even then. D’you remember Mrs. Gretorex? She was very much the _grande dame_----”

“Yes, she was in a way, but so really kind. She took a great fancy to me,” said Janey Berwick slowly.

“I don’t think she approved of me. She thought you ought to do better.”

Berwick’s wife smiled. It was true that Mrs. Gretorex hadn’t much cared for the dour, silent, medical student who was obviously in love with her attractive young friend.

“It all comes back to me. They were fearfully poor; but Mrs. Gretorex was keeping up all her charities in the village just as if she had still been the rich lady of the manor. I thought it splendid of her. What is Roger Gretorex like now? He was such a handsome boy,” she concluded, with some curiosity.

Her husband waited a moment, then he answered: “He’s still good-looking; I can tell you that much. But I didn’t like the look of him. He said that he’d taken over a slum practice, somewhere in Westminster.”

“Is he a great friend of Mr. Lexton?”

“He seemed to be, though they’re as different as chalk from cheese. The one’s a born idler, the other I should say a born worker; though, mind you, Squire Gretorex was a bad man. D’you remember the sort of things we were told about him, Janey? How he had come in for thirty thousand a year when he was twenty-one, and how by the time he was fifty he had run through the whole of his fortune on the turf?”

“I expect Dr. Gretorex takes after his mother,” she said with a smile.

Suddenly there came the postman’s loud knock, and Berwick, jumping up, went out into the hall.

He came back with only one rather bulky letter, addressed to himself, in a woman’s sloping handwriting as yet unknown to him.

He opened the large, square, pale-mauve envelope slowly, deliberately. It contained a note folded in two, and also an enclosure, an envelope on which was written “Prescriptions.”

He glanced over the note:

Dear Dr. Berwick,

You asked me to send you Dr. Lancaster’s prescriptions. I found them just after you left. Jervis is feeling better this afternoon, and the nurse says that if you’re busy she doesn’t think you need come to-morrow.

Yours sincerely,
Ivy Lexton.

He looked across at his wife. “It’s from Mrs. Lexton. She says her husband’s better, and that I need not go there to-morrow. That’s a comfort!”

Idly he took out what that other envelope contained. Dr. Lancaster’s prescriptions might give him a clue as to what the old fellow really thought of Lexton’s mysterious condition.

“Hallo!” he exclaimed in a tone of extreme surprise, for what was written on a wide sheet of thin, common paper, folded in eight, ran:

_Friday night._

My own precious love (for that you are and always will be)--