Cleek had barely time to recall Narkom's statement regarding the semi-imbecile mother, when Miss Valmond gave a little cry of wonder and ran into the room.
"Why, mother!" she said in her gentle way, "whatever are you doing down here, dearest? I thought you were still asleep in the oratory. When did you come down?"
The imbecile merely mumbled and muttered, and shook her nodding head, neither answering nor taking any notice whatsoever.
"It is one of her bad nights," explained Miss Valmond, as she came out and rejoined them. "We can do nothing with her when she is like this. Horace, you will have to come home earlier than usual to-night and help me to get her to bed." Then she went on, leading the way upstairs, until they came at length to a sort of sanctuary where Madonna faces looked down from sombre niches, and wax lights burnt with a scented flame on a draped and cushioned prie dieu. Here Miss Valmond, who was in the lead, went in, and, taking a paper-wrapped parcel from beside the little altar, came back and put it in her brother's hand and sent him on his way.
"Was it from there you saw the occurrence, Miss Valmond?" asked Cleek, looking past her into "the dim religious light" of the sanctuary.
"Oh, no," she made reply. "From the window of my bedroom, just on the other side of the wall. In here, look, see!" And she opened a door to the right and led them in, touching a key that flashed an electric lamp into radiance and illuminated the entire room.
It was a large room furnished in dull oak and dark green after the stately, sombre style of a Gothic chapel, and at one end there was a curtained recess leading to a large bow window. At the other there was a sort of altar banked high with white flowers, and at the side there was a huge canopied bed over the head of which hung an immense crucifix fastened to the wall that backed upon the oratory. It was a majestic thing, that crucifix, richly carved and exquisitely designed. Cleek went nearer and looked at it, his artistic eye captured by the beauty of it; and Miss Valmond, noting his interest, smiled.
"My brother brought me that from Rome," she said. "Is it not divine, Mr. Headland?"
"Yes," he said. "But you must be more careful of it, I fear, Miss Valmond. Is it not chipping? Look! Isn't this a piece of it?" He bent and picked a tiny curled sliver of wood from the narrow space between the two down-filled pillows of the bed, holding it out to her upon his palm. But, of a sudden, he smiled, lifted the sliver to his nose, smelt it, and cast it away. "The laugh is on me, I fear--it's only a cedar paring from a lead pencil. And now, please, I'd like to investigate the window."