Page:Chipperfield--Unseen Hands.djvu/109

Rh almost one-hundred per cent pure. Mrs. Lorne was in perfect health until the day she ran the needle into her finger. I have been her family physician for many years. I brought all her children into the world, and I knew her constitution thoroughly. Moreover, the analysis of her blood would have shown any impurity."

"You were, aware that up to the time of her illness she was taking a course of beauty treatment of some sort?"

The doctor snorted.

"Beauty butchery, you mean!" he retorted. "Quack surgery! Face-lifting, they call it; cut the skin around the temples and raise it to remove wrinkles and make the skin tight. I did all I could to prevent her making a fool of herself; but if you had known Mrs. Lorne, Sergeant, you would know that you might as well have talked to the winds as try to dissuade her from anything she had set her mind upon. She had the effrontery to tell her husband that I had ordered her to stay in town and undergo a course of electrical treatments; and I—I was weak enough to back her up. But I watched the progress of the skin-lifting process carefully, and I can certify that it had nothing to do with her death. The treatment was completed and the slight incisions fully healed several days before the needle episode."

"Have you that needle now, Doctor?" The query was made in a quiet, almost casual tone, but it seemed an age to the detective before the little doctor responded:

"I have. I don't know why I preserved it; but it marked a case which was, as I have said, unique in my experience. Would you like to see it, Sergeant?"

"If you will be so kind."

The physician walked over to a glass case which stood