Some premonition of evil gripped her very heart.
"What do you mean ?" she said, and the other woman could not help noting the distress in her voice.
"If you didn't send, who did ?" came the immediate response.

"We were just going to have tea when a gentleman, a stranger, came and asked for Mrs.Forbes.We saw him arrive in a car which halted at the foot of the path--nearly a quarter of a mile away.

Your mother answered, and he said that you were in Eastbourne, and had sent him to bring you to the hotel.
He said the car belonged to a Doctor Somebody, but he himself looked like a foreigner." A few others had gathered around, attracted by Evelyn Forbes's pallor and distress; Winter, too, had drawn near, and it was he who said: "Did you see this stranger who brought the message ?" "O yes, plainly," said Mrs.Montagu.
"Had he a scar down the left side of his face ?" "Yes." Then Evelyn Forbes, for the first time in her vigorous young life, fainted.

Her mother was in the power of Wong Li Fu.

All the terrors which imagination had painted in her own behalf were redoubled as to her mother's fate.