"I think," said Ashton-Kirk, quietly, "that you had better make an effort to control yourself. You are cold with fear. It is necessary that you answer a few questions; so try and calm yourself--even if only for that reason."
"I can't! I can't!" She made a despairing sort of gesture, the great eyes filled with a thrilling terror. "How can I be calm when I read such things in his face?" One hand was upon the arm of the secret agent, the other upon that of young Warwick; she looked first at one and then the other. "Death is near to him," she said. "It is very near to him."
"I tell you, yes! And, perhaps, it is even nearer than I dream. It may be upon the very threshold."
"Have you been blind, Philip?" she asked in the same whispering voice as before. "Have you been blind that you have not seen? But no," her tone changing tenderly, "it is not to be expected of you. He has not been a father to _you_."
"No," said Warwick, and somehow a second meaning seemed to lurk behind the words, "he has not."
"Never," she said, "has any one been better or kinder than Dr. Morse has been to me. Everything that I have I owe to him. And so can you wonder that _I_ have been quick to see?"
"The fear," she answered, "the fear which has gradually taken possession of him. You have seen some of it," to Warwick, "but not all. It is terror of the unseen, of the unknown. It is fear of a danger which he does not understand."
"You think, then, that Dr. Morse does not know the meaning of these grotesque messages which he has been receiving?"
"I know that he does not. I have always known it; but just how, I cannot say. This evening, upon opening the letter, he rushed out of the library. I happened to be passing the hall, and heard him cry out: 'Be plain! Who are you? What do you want?'"
"Yes; for with the last word he threw open the front door and was gone."
Ashton-Kirk glanced at the two-colored cross.
"Perhaps," said he, "if we could find the envelope which this came in, it would tell us something."
"Will you come into the library?" said Warwick.
As they were moving toward the door, Ashton-Kirk whispered a few quick words to Fuller; the latter nodded and took a seat by the window, partly screened by a hanging and apparently much interested in the lawn.