‘Yes!’ Fuchsia had to swallow hard before she could shout back, for she was very frightened, ‘Yes, Dr Prune.’

‘Slagg!’ shouted the Doctor, ‘keep Titus near the keyhole. See that she does, Fuchsia.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Fuchsia; and went in search of Mrs Slagg.

It was just then that an uncontrolled scream rang through the room.

Irma, who had been tearing her cream-coloured handkerchief, now found that she had ripped it into such minute particles that with nothing left to tear, and with her hands in forced idleness, she could control herself no longer. Her knuckles had tried to stifle the cry, but her terror had grown too strong for such expedients, and at the final moment she forgot all she had learnt about decorum and about how to be a lady, and clenching her hands at her thighs she had stood on tip-toe and screamed from her swanlike throat with an effect calculated to freeze the blood of a macaw.

An enormous figure had loomed out of the smoke a few feet from Lord Sepulchrave, and as he watched the vague head take shape and recognized it as that belonging to the top half of his wife’s body, his limbs had stiffened, for Irma’s scream had rung out simultaneously with the appearance of the head, the untoward proximity of which conjointed with the scream giving ventriloquistic horror to the moment. Added to the frightfulness of a head and a voice, attacking his ear and eye simultaneously though from different distances, was the dreadful conception of Gertrude losing control in that way and giving vent to a scream of such a shrill pitch as to be incompatible with the slack ’cello string that reverberated so heavily in her throat. He knew at once that it was not Gertrude who had screamed, but the very idea that it might have been, filled him with sickness, and there raced through his mind the thought that for all his wife’s uncompromising, loveless weight of character it would be a grim and evil thing were she to change.

The flat blur of his wife’s head turned itself towards the scream upon a blurred neck, and he could see the vast wavering profile begin to move away from him, inch by inch, and steer into the thickness beyond, charting its course by the shrill shooting-star of Irma’s cry.

Lord Sepulchrave gripped his hands together convulsively until his knuckles were bloodless and their ten staring crests wavered whitely through the smoke which lay between his hands and his head.

The blood began to beat a tattoo at his temples, and upon his high white brow a few big beads gathered.