Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

Ninon’s tones were as restrained as those of her accuser, but Dr. Hailey fancied that she had grown slightly paler. He leaned back in his chair, and adjusted his eyeglass.

“Lord Templewood heard the sound of the horse’s hooves,” he declared. “He told me so this morning.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

The girl leaned forward and plucked one of the blue anemones from the bowl in the center of the table. A little shower of dust fell from its petals as she did so. She pulled off one of its petals and dropped it on the lacquered surface.

“He told you?”

“Oh, yes.”

A smile flickered on the doctor’s lips.

“And you naturally assumed, as he had assumed, that this was a visitation by the Horseman of Death, the family ghost?”

His tones caressed her. She crushed the flower in her hand and flung it down, violently, on the floor. To his surprise, he saw tears gleaming in her eyes.

“That is what I think now, this minute.”

“I see. And that, no doubt, is what suggested to your mind, in the first instance, the admirable reproduction of the sounds of a galloping horse with which you entertained us all the other evening.”

“It is not true.”

Her tones rang with repudiation of his charge.

“What is not true?”

“That I have cheated to make that sound.”

She caught her brow in her hand, clasping it so that her nails grew white.

“On the other hand, it is true that the sound frightened Lord Templewood nearly out of his wits; and was very well calculated to exercise exactly that effect on him.”

Dr. Hailey rose as he spoke. He allowed his eyeglass to drop. He added:

“And it is also true that last night you gave him an injection of hashish into his right shoulder of so potent a kind that, had not help been immediately available, he must inevitably have become insane. May I ask why you have been trying to rob Lord Templewood of his reason?”

Ninon had recoiled a step. Now, with a swift gesture, she drew the collar of her frock away from her left shoulder, exposing to him its bare contour.

“You shall see,” she cried, in her contralto voice.

Dr. Hailey uttered an exclamation of horror.

Across the fair white of the shoulder was a weal, livid as the healed scar of a branding iron.

Chapter XXX “You Know the Man”

“That is where he wounded me one I night when he walked in his sleep to my bedroom.”

Ninon drew her shoulders together as she spoke, defending herself anew against that hideous recollection. The breath hissed between her lips.

“On that night also, he had tried to cut his own throat. There was blood on his neck.”

She moved her hand in an imperious gesture which bade Dr. Hailey be seated. She approached him with her shoulder still bared. She added:

“So he would have wounded Mrs. Malone, if I had not been with her the other night to call his Beatrice to him.” Her eyes grew misty suddenly. She lowered her voice to a whisper.

“And I will tell you why. It was, thus, twenty years ago, that he wounded Beatrice in the great hall of his castle when she came to confess to him that Willoughby Bryan was her lover, and to ask his forgiveness. Each time that he walks in his sleep, it is to keep the same tryst with that frail one.”

Ninon snatched at her frock, and so drew it again over the scar.

“Is not hashish,” she demanded, “a good medicine for such cases?”

Dr. Hailey did not reply for a moment, but his expression was troubled.

“That explanation,” he said at last, “can scarcely be stretched to cover the case of Mrs. Malone, to whom, as I understand, you are also giving this drug.”

He raised his eyes, from which the horror had not wholly passed away, to her eyes. Ninon sighed deeply. She told him how she had rescued Sacha from the gas-filled bedroom. Then suddenly she collapsed into one of her lacquer chairs and buried her head in her arms.

She began to sob bitterly, passionately, like a child whose nerves have been utterly overwrought. Dr. Hailey thought that she looked a lonely little figure, even, perhaps, in her misguided faith, and in spite of her trickery, a pathetic little figure. He laid his hand on her shoulder in a kindly gesture.

The girl looked up at him. Her mysterious eyes were veiled by her tears.

“When people are in great trouble,” she said simply, “usually they come to me. I have done for them what I could — for Lord Templewood, for Sacha Malone.”

The doctor inclined his head.

“Mrs. Malone,” he asked, “did not tell you, did she, the nature of her trouble?”

“No. And I did not ask her to tell me. I do not seek to know of such things.”

She pressed a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes.

“It may be that what you have said about the death of her husband is the reason why she is afraid. It is not for herself that she fears, no; but for Mr. Dick Lovelace. I am sure.”

Dr. Hailey leaned toward the girl.

“She told you that?”

“Oh, yes. Listen: before I gave her my medicine, she told me, ‘Dick Lovelace is in terrible danger.’ ”