"In danger?" Mr. Narkom sat forward in his chair, his professional instincts awake at the word. "Who is the woman of whom you speak, Miss Duggan, and why should she have designs on your father's life? Begin at the beginning and tell me where you live, and all about it. There's plenty of time, you know. Things don't happen so rapidly as a lot of you young people imagine. You are Scotch, are you not?"
"I am. And my father is Sir Andrew Duggan, of whom you have no doubt heard. He--he has large possessions in Scotland. A big landowner, you know----"
"And a hard one," said Mr. Narkom mentally recalling certain paragraphs about the gentleman which appeared from time to time in the Scotch papers.
"Our home is at Aygon--Aygon Castle, in Argyllshire. And there are two of us by our father's first marriage--my brother Ross and me. Ross, as you know, is heir to the estates, of course, as eldest son of the line (that part of them which is entailed); but some seventeen years ago my father married again, an Italian woman whom he met upon one of his periodical journeys abroad."
"It is!" Her voice ran up a tiny scale of excitement. She shut her hands together and breathed hard, and leaning forward in her seat, let her big dark eyes dwell a moment upon his face. "That woman is a would-be murderer, a fiend incarnate, prompted to heaven knows what awful action by her ambitions for her son Cyril!"
"My father's child. Cyril is sixteen this birthday--a nice lad, but with all the Latin traits of his mother's race--those traits which mix so badly with our Scotch character, Mr. Narkom. Paula has planned this thing from the beginning--slowly, secretly, steadily. She has planned to wrest the estates from Ross, to turn his own father against him, so that at the last he will remake his will and leave all that he possesses to Cyril--and rob Ross of his rightful inheritance!"
"My dear lady, have you any foundation for believing this?" put in Mr. Narkom at this juncture, as she paused. "An ambitious woman is not necessarily a potential murderess, you know."
"But this one is. One can see it in her eyes when she looks at Ross, and one can read it in every gesture--every thought that passes across her face. She is a dangerous woman, Mr. Narkom, who will stop at nothing. Her own father, I believe, had a career that was shrouded in mystery, so far as we can trace, but there was theft in it, and crime, too--that much I have ascertained. His daughter is the fitting descendant of the family. I repeat, there is nothing she will stop at--nothing!--and now that Ross has taken up with this electricity installation--he has been mad on engineering ever since he was big enough to toddle, but Father would not permit him to go in for it--Lady Paula has used it to her own desperate plans, and has practically succeeded in turning Father against Ross, so that the two hardly speak when they meet, and avoid each other as much as possible in the daily round of life."