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Robert Audley grasped the physician’s hands in both his own.

“I will thank you when I am better able to do so,” he said, with emotion; “I will thank you in my uncle’s name as well as in my own.”

“I have only five minutes more, and I have a letter to write,” said Dr. Mosgrave, smiling at the young man’s energy.

He seated himself at a writing-table in the window, dipped his pen in the ink, and wrote rapidly for about seven minutes. He had filled three sides of a sheet of note-paper, when he threw down his pen and folded his letter.

He put this letter into an envelope, and delivered it, unsealed, to Robert Audley.

The address which it bore was:

“Monsieur Val,

“Villebrumeuse,

“Belgium.”

Mr. Audley looked rather doubtfully from this address to the doctor, who was putting on his gloves as deliberately as if his life had never known a more solemn purpose than the proper adjustment of them.

“That letter,” he said, in answer to Robert Audley’s inquiring look, “is written to my friend Monsieur Val, the proprietor and medical superintendent of a very excellent maison de sante in the town of Villebrumeuse. We have known each other for many years, and he will no doubt willingly receive Lady Audley into his establishment, and charge himself with the full responsibility of her future life; it will not be a very eventful one!”

Robert Audley would have spoken, he would have once more expressed his gratitude for the help which had been given to him, but Dr. Mosgrave checked him with an authoritative gesture.

“From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,” he said, “her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets forever! Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations. But as a physiologist and as an honest man, I believe you could do no better service to society than by doing this; for physiology is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes ago is a woman to be trusted at large. If she could have sprung at my throat and strangled me with her little hands, as I sat talking to her just now, she would have done it.”

“She suspected your purpose, then!”

“She knew it. ‘You think I am mad like my mother, and you have come to question me,’ she said. ‘You are watching for some sign of the dreadful taint in my blood.’ Good-day to you, Mr. Audley,” the physician added hurriedly, “my time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I shall do to catch the train.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

BURIED ALIVE

Robert Audley sat alone in the library with the physician’s letter upon the table before him, thinking of the work which was still to be done.

The young barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now her jailer. Not until he had delivered the letter which lay before him to its proper address, not until he had given up his charge into the safe-keeping of the foreign mad-house doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden be removed from him and his duty done.

He wrote a few lines to my lady, telling her that he was going to carry her away from Audley Court to a place from which she was not likely to return, and requesting her to lose no time in preparing for the journey. He wished to start that evening, if possible, he told her.

Miss Susan Martin, the lady’s maid, thought it a very hard thing to have to pack her mistress’ trunks in such a hurry, but my lady assisted in the task. She toiled resolutely in directing and assisting her servant, who scented bankruptcy and ruin in all this packing up and hurrying away, and was therefore rather languid and indifferent in the discharge of her duties; and at six o’clock in the evening she sent her attendant to tell Mr. Audley that she was ready to depart as soon as he pleased.