‘I had to see you,’ she said.

‘I expected you,’ said Mortimer. ‘It was you who wrote S.O.S. on the table in my room last night, wasn’t it?’

Magdalen nodded.

‘Why?’ asked Mortimer gently.

The girl turned aside and began pulling off leaves from a bush.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘honestly, I don’t know.’

‘Tell me,’ said Mortimer.

Magdalen drew a deep breath.

‘I am a practical person,’ she said, ‘not the kind of person who imagines things or fancies them. You, I know, believe in ghosts and spirits. I don’t, and when I tell you that there is something very wrong in that house,’ she pointed up the hill, ‘I mean that there is something tangibly wrong; it’s not just an echo of the past. It has been coming on ever since we’ve been there. Every day it grows worse, Father is different, Mother is different, Charlotte is different.’

Mortimer interposed. ‘Is Johnnie different?’ he asked.

Magdalen looked at him, a dawning appreciation in her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, ‘now I come to think of it, Johnnie is not different. He is the only one who’s—who’s untouched by it all. He was untouched last night at tea.’

‘And you?’ asked Mortimer.

‘I was afraid—horribly afraid, just like a child—without knowing what it was I was afraid of. And father was—queer, there’s no other word for it, queer. He talked about miracles and then I prayed—actually prayed for a miracle, and you knocked on the door.’

She stopped abruptly, staring at him.

‘I seem mad to you, I suppose,’ she said defiantly.

‘No,’ said Mortimer, ‘on the contrary you seem extremely sane. All sane people have a premonition of danger if it is near them.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Magdalen. ‘I was not afraid—for myself.’

‘For whom, then?’

But again Magdalen shook her head in a puzzled fashion. ‘I don’t know.’

She went on:

‘I wrote S.O.S. on an impulse. I had an idea—absurd, no doubt, that they would not let me speak to you—the rest of them, I mean. I don’t know what it was I meant to ask you to do. I don’t know now.’

‘Never mind,’ said Mortimer. ‘I shall do it.’

‘What can you do?’

Mortimer smiled a little.

‘I can think.’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘Yes,’ said Mortimer, ‘a lot can be done that way, more than you would ever believe. Tell me, was there any chance word or phrase that attracted your attention just before the meal last evening?’

Magdalen frowned. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘At least I heard Father say something to Mother about Charlotte being the living image of her, and he laughed in a very queer way, but—there’s nothing odd in that, is there?’

‘No,’ said Mortimer slowly, ‘except that Charlotte is not like your mother.’

He remained lost in thought for a minute or two, then looked up to find Magdalen watching him uncertainly.

‘Go home, child,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry; leave it in my hands.’