He Who Whispers

“Dutiful my foot,” said Stephen, without stress or resentment; he simply stated a fact. At the same time, obviously soothed and shaken back to normal by this time, he dismissed the subject of Fay Seton. “By George, Miles, you must have me to a meeting of this Murder Club! What do they do there?”

“It's a dinner club.”

“You mean you pretend the salt is poison? That sort of thing? And score a point if you can shove it into somebody's coffee without being detected? All right, old man: don't be offended! I must be pushing off now.”

“Steve!” Marion spoke in a voice whose inflection her brother knew only too well. “I forgot something. May I have a word with you? You will excuse us for a moment, Miles!”

Talking about him, eh?

Miles glowered at the table, trying to pretend he was unconscious of this, as Marion moved with Stephen towards the door. Marion was speaking in an animated undertone, Stephen shrugging his shoulders and smiling as he put on his hat. Miles took a drink of tea that had begun to grow cold.

He had an uncomfortable suspicion that he was somehow making a fool of himself, certainly that he was losing his sense of humour. But why? The true answer to that occurred to him a moment later. It was because he wondered whether he might not be loosing in his own household certain forces over which he had no control.

A cash-register rang: outside the windows rose the chug of a train; the burring voice of the loud-speaker recalled him to Waterloo Station. Miles told himself that this fleeting idea―the momentary intense chill which touched his heart―was all nonsense. He repeated it, summoning up a laugh, and felt his spirits improved when Marion returned.

“Sorry if I sounded bad-tempered, Marion.”

“My dear boy!” She dismissed this with a gesture. Then she eyed him persuasively. “But now that we're alone, Miles, tell you little sister all about it.”

“There isn't anything to tell! I met this girl, I liked her manners, I was convinced she'd been slandered....”

“But you didn't tell her you knew anything about her?”

“Not a word. She didn't mention t, either.”

“She gave you references, of course?”

“I didn't ask for them. Why should you be so interested?”

“Miles, Miles!” Marion shook her head. “Practically every woman falls for that sauntering Charles-the-Second air of yours, the more so as you're superbly unconscious of it yourself. Now don't draw yourself up and look stuffy! You hate it when I take any interest in you welfare!”

“I only meant that these constant sisterly character analyses―

“And when I hear of a woman who seems to have impressed you so much, naturally I'm interested!” Marion's eyes remained steady. “What was the trouble she was mixed up in?”

Mile's gaze wandered out of the window.

“Six years ago she went over to Chartres as private secretary to a wealthy leather manufacturer named Brooke. She became engaged to be married to the son of the house....”

“Oh.”

“... a young neurotic name Harry Brooke. Afterwards there was a row of some kind.” Inwardly Miles choked over the words. He couldn't, physically couldn't, tell Marion about Howard Brooke's determination to buy of this girl.

“What kind of a row, Miles?”

“Nobody knows; or at least I don't. One afternoon the father climbed up to the top of a tower that's a landmark in the district, and ...” Miles broke off. “By the way, you won't mention any of this to Miss Seton? You won't gibe her any intimation you know?”

“Do you think I could be so tactless, Miles?”

“It was a wild, rainy, thundery day over the tower, like a scene in a German ghost-story. Mr. Brooke was found stabbed through the back with his own sword-stick. But that's the amazing part of the whole business, Marion. The evidence showed he must have been alone when he died. Nobody cam near him or could have come near him. It almost seemed that the murder, it it was murder, must have been committed by someone who could rise up unsupported in the air....”

Again he paused. For Marion was contemplating him in a strange, wide-eyed, searching way, bursting and balanced on the edge of laughter.

“Miles Hammond!” she cried. “Who's been stuffing you full of this awful rubbish?”

“I am simply,” he said through his teeth, “stating the facts of the official police investigation.”

“All right, dear. But who told you?”

“Professor Rigaud of Edinburgh University. A distinguished man in the academic world. You must have come across his Life of Cagliostro?”

“No. Who's Cagliostro?”

(Why is it―Miles had often pondered the question―that in debates with you own family you are inclined to lose your temper over questions which from an outsider would be greeted with mildness, even amusement?)

“Count Cagliostro, Marion, was a famous wizard and charlatan o the eighteenth century. Professor Rigaud takes the line that Cagliostro, though he was a thundering fraud in most respects, really did possess certain psychic powers which ...”

For the third time he checked himself. Marion was whooping. And, hearing what his own voice must sound like, Miles had enough sense of proportion left to agree that possibly he might have made a better choice of words.

“Yes,” he admitted. “It does sound a bit funny, doesn't it?”

“It certainly does, Miles. I'll believe that sort of thing when I see it. But never mind Count Cagliostro. Stop pulling my leg and tell me about this girl! Who is she? What's she like? What sort of influence does she have?”

“You can find out for yourself, Marion.”

Still gazing down out of the window, Miles rose to his feet. He was looking at one of the green-painted signs opposite the platform gates, the sign where travellers already drifted by ones and twos in readiness for the five-thirty train to Winchester, Southampton Central, and Bournemouth. And with great deliberation Miles nodded towards it.

“There she is now.”

Chapter VII

Grey twilight hung over Greywood in the New Forest, that evening which afterwards was to be so well remembered.

Off the main motor-road from Southampton branches another motor-road. Follow this into tall green depths where forest ponies browse at the edges. Presently turn left at a broad wooden gate, down the curve of a gravel path dusky even at noonday, cross a rustic bridge over the stream which winds through the estate, and just ahead is Greywood―set against a green law, encircled by the might of beeches and oaks.

Long and narrow-built, not large, its narrow side faces you as you cross the rustic bridge. You must climb up a few stone-flagged steps, and go round a flagged terrace to what seems the side of the house, in order to reach the front door. Built of wood and of brick plastered over,it stands out brown and white against the sun-dusted forest. It has friendliness and it is touched with magic.

One or two lights gleamed in the windows tonight. They wee paraffin lamps, since the electric power-plant of Sir Charles Hammond's day had not yet been put in order.

Their light grew stronger, yellow and tremulous, as the cool dusk deepened. Perceptible now, almost unnoticed by day, was the silky splash of water over the miniature dam. Dusk blurred the outlines of the bright-canopied garden swing, with wicker chairs and a table for serving tea, which stood on the open lawn westwards towards the curve of the stream.

And in a long room at the rear of the house―a room after his own heart―stood Miles Hammond, holding a lamp above his head.

“It's all right,” he was saying to himself. “I didn't make a mistake in bringing her here. It's all right.”

But he knew in his heart that it wasn't all right.

The flame of the little lamp, in ts tiny cylindrical glass shade, partly drew the shadows from a mummified world of books. It was strong, of course, to call this place a library. It was a stack-room, a repository, an immensely long dust-heap for the two or three thousand volumes accumulated like dust by his late uncle. Books old and broken, books newish and shiny, books in quarto and octavo and folio, books in fine bindings and books withered black: breathing their exhilarating mustiness, a treasure-house hardly yet touched.

Their shelves reached to the ceiling, built even round the door to the dining-room and enclosing the row of little-paned windows that faced east. Books piled the floor in ranks, mounds, and top-heavy towers of unequal height, a maze of which the lanes between were so narrow that you could hardly move without knocking books over in a fluttering puff of dust.

“It's all right!” he fiercely said aloud.

And the door opened, and Fay Seton came in.

“Did you call me, Mr. Hammond?”

“Call you, Miss Seton? No.”

“I beg your pardon. I thought I heard you call.”

“I must have been talking to myself. But it might interest you to have a look at this confusion.”

Fay Seton stood there framed in the doorway, with the many-hued books on either side of her. Rather tall and soft and slender, her head a little on one side. She herself was carrying a paraffin lamp; and, as she lifted the lamp so that it illuminated her face, Miles was conscious of a sense of shock.

In daylight, at the Berkeley and later on the train journey, sh had seemed … not older, though in fact she was older; not less attractive … but subtly and disquietingly different from the image in his mind.

Now, by artificial light, under the softened radiance of the lamp, it was as though for the first time the photographic image of last night had sprung to life. It was only a brief glimpse, of eye and cheek and mouth, as she raised the lamp to glance round her. Bu the very passiveness of those aloof features, with their polite smile, flowed out and troubled the judgment.

Miles held up his own lamp, so that the light of the two clashed in an unsteady shadow-play, slow and yet wild, across the walls of books.

“The place is a mess, isn't it?”

“It's not nearly as bad as I'd expected,” answered Fay. She spoke in a low voice and seldom raised her eyes.

“I'm afraid I haven't dusted or cleaned up for you.”

“That doesn't matter, Mr. Hammond.”

“My uncle,if I remember correctly, bought a card-index cabinet and an incredible number of reference cards. But he never did any cataloguing. The things are somewhere in this jumble.”

“I can find them, Mr. Hammond.”

“Is my sister―er―making you comfortable?”

“Oh, yes!” She gave him a quick smile. “Miss Hammond wanted to move out of her bedroom up there”―she nodded towards the ceiling of the library―and move me in there. But I couldn't have her do that. Anyway, there are reasons why I much, much prefer to be on the ground floor. You don't mind?”

“Mind? Of course not! Won't you come in?”

“Thank you.”

The piles of books on the floor ranged from breast-high to waist-high. Obediently Fay moved forward, with the extraordinary and unconscious grace of hers, edging sideways among the lanes so that her rather shabby dove-grey dress hardly brushed them. She set down the little lamp on a heap of folios, raising a breath of dust, and looked round again.

“It looks interesting,” she said. “What were your uncle's interests?”

“Almost anything. He specialized in medieval history. But he was also keen on archaeology and sport and gardening and chess. Even crime and― Miles checked himself abruptly. “You're sure you're quite comfortable here?”

“Oh, yes! Miss Hammond―she asked me to call her Marion―has been very kind.”

Well, yes: yes, Miles supposed, she had been kind. During the train journey, and afterwards while she and Fay prepared a scratch meal in the big kitchen, Marion had talked away twenty to the dozen. Marion had almost gushed over their guest. Yet Miles, who knew his sister, was uneasy in his mind.

“I'm sorry about the servant situation,” he told her. “They can't be obtained in this part of the world for love or money. At least, by newcomers. I didn't want you to have to . . . to . . .”

Her tone was deprecating.

“But I like it. It's cozy. We three are all alone here. And this is the New Forest!”

“Yes.”

Hesitantly, with that same sinuous grace, Fay edged through the lanes over to the row of small-paned windows―themselves framed all round with books―in the east wall. The stationary lamp threw an elongated shadow of her. Two of the window-lights stood open, propped open on catches like little doors. Fay Seton leaned her hands on the window-sill and looked out. Miles, holding his own lamp high, blundered over to join her.

Outside it was not quite dark.

A grass terrace sloped up a few feet to another open space of grass bounded by a straggling iron fence. Beyond that―remote, mysterious, ash-grey turning to black in that unreal light―the tall forest pressed in on them.

“How large is the forest, Mr. Hammond?”

“About a hundred thousand acres.”

“As large as that? I hadn't realized . . .”

“Very few people do. But you can walk into the forest, over there, and get lost and wander about for hours, so that they have to send out a search-party for you. It sounds absurd in a small country like England, but my uncle used to tell me it happened time after time. As a newcomer, I haven't liked to venture too far myself.”

“No, of course not. It looks . . . I don't know! . . .”

“Magical?”

“Something like that.” Fay moved her shoulders.

“You see where I'm pointing, Miss Seton?”

“Yes?”

“Not a very great walk from here is the spot where William Rufus, the Red King, was killed with an arrow while he was out hunting. There's an iron monstrosity to mark it now. And―you know The White Company?”

She nodded quickly.

“The moon rises very late tonight,” said Miles. “But one night soon you and I―and Marion too, of course―must take a walk by full moonlight in the New Forest.”

“That would be awfully nice.”

She was still leaning forward, the palms of her hands flat on the window-sill; sh nodded as though she had hardly heard him. Miles was standing close to her. He could look down on the soft line of her shoulders, the whiteness of her neck, the heavy dark-red hair glistening under lamplight. Th perfume she used was faint but distinctive. Miles became aware of the disturbing nearness of her physical presence.

Perhaps she realized this; for abruptly, but in her unobtrusive way, she moved away from him and threaded a path back through the books to where sh had left the lamp. Miles also turned abruptly and starred out of the window.

He could see her reflection, ghostly in the window-glass. Picking up an old newspaper, she shook it out for dust, opened it, and put it down on a pile of books. Then she sat down, beside the little lamp.

“Careful!” he warned without turning round. “You'll get yourself dirty.”

“That doesn't matter.” She kept her eyes lowered. “It's lovely here, Mr. Hammond. I imagine the air is very good?”

“Excellent. You'll sleep like the dead tonight.”

“Do you have difficulty in going to sleep?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Your sister said you'd been very ill.”

“I'm all right now.”

“War?”

“Yes. The peculiar and painful and unheroic form of poisoning you get in the Tank Corps.”

“Harry Brooke was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk in nineteen-forty,” remarked Fay, with absolutely no change of tone. “He joined the French Army as liaison-officer with the British―being bi-lingual, you see―and he was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.”

During a thunderclap of silence, while Mile's ears seemed to ring and Fay Seton's voice remained exactly the same, he stood staring at her reflection in the window-glass. Then she added:

“You know all about me, don't you?”

Miles put down the lamp on the window-sill, because his hand was shaking, and he felt a constriction across his chest. He swung round to face her.

“Who told you . . .?”

“Your sister intimated it. She said you were moody and had imaginative fits.”

(Marion, eh?)

“I think it was awfully decent of you, Mr. Hammond, to give me this position―and I am rather badly off!―without asking me anything about it. They very nearly sent me to the guillotine, you know, for the murder of Harry's father. But don't you think you ought to hear my side of it?”

Long pause.

A cool breeze, infinitely healing, crept in through the window-lights and mingled with the fustiness of old books. From the corner of his eye Miles noticed a black strand of cobweb swaying from the ceiling. He cleared his throat.

“It's none of my business, Miss Seton. And I don't want to upset you.”

“It doesn't upset me. Really it doesn't.”

“But don't you feel . . .?”

“No. Not now.” She spoke in a very odd one. The blue eyes, their whites very luminous in lamplight, turned sideways. She put on hand against her breast, a hand very white in contrast to the grey silk dress, and pressed hard there. “Self-sacrifice!” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What we won't do,” murmured Fay Seton, “if we get a chance to sacrifice ourselves!” She was silent for a long time, the wide-spaced blue eyes expressionless and lowered. “Forgive me, Mr. Hammond. It doesn't really matter, but I wonder who told you about this.”

“Professor Rigaud.”

“Oh. Georges Rigaud.” She nodded. “I heard he'd escaped from France during the German occupation, and taken a university post in England. I only asked that, you see, because your sister wasn't sure. For some reason she seemed to think the source of your information was Count Cagliostro.”

They both laughed. Miles was glad of an excuse to laugh, glad to relieve his feelings by shouting at the top of his lungs; but the noise of that laughter went up with inexplicable eerieness under the towering walls of books.

“I―I didn't kill Mr. Brooke,” said Fay. “Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hammond. I . . .”

(God knows, Miles thought to himself, I do want to hear your story! Go on! Go on! Go on!)

“I went out to France,” she told him in her low voice, “to be Mr. Brooke's personal secretary. I wasn't what you might call,” she looked away from him, “experienced.”

Miles nodded without speaking, since she had paused.

“It was awfully pleasant there. The Brookes were pleasant, or so I thought. I . . . well, you've probably heard that I fell in love with Harry Brooke. I really did fall in love with him, Mr. Hammond, from the start.”

Mile's question, a question he had not meant to ask, was wrung out of him. “But you refused Harry the first time he proposed marriage?”

“Did I? Who told you that?”

“Professor Rigaud.”

“Oh, I see.” (What was that strange, secret, inner amusement about her eyes? Or did he imagine it?) “In any case, Mr. Hammond, we did become engaged. I think I was very happy, because I've always been domestic-minded. We were making plans for the future, when someone began circulating report about me.”

Miles's throat felt dry.

“What sort of reports?”

“Oh, of gross immorality.” Faint colour stained the smooth white cheeks; still she kept her eyelids lowered. “And something else which is really,” Fay half laughed, “too stupid to bother you with. I never heard any of this, of course. But Mr. Brooke must have been hearing for some weeks, though he never said anything. First of all I think he had been getting anonymous letters.”

“Anonymous letters?” exclaimed Miles.

“Yes.”

“Professor Rigaud didn't say anything about that!”

“Perhaps not. It's―it's only what I think, of course. Matters were awfully strained at the house: in the study when Mr. Brooke was dictating, and at meals, and in the evening. Even Mrs. Brooke seemed to guess something had gone wrong. The we came to that awful day of the twelfth of August, when Mr. Brooke died.”

Backing away, never taking his eyes from her, Miles Hammond hauled himself up to sit on the wide ledge of the windows.

The tiny lamp-flames burned clearly; the shadows were steady. But in Miles' imagination this long library might have been swept away. He was again outside Chartres beside the Eure, with its backgrounds at the villa called Beauregard and the stone tower looming above the river. The old scenes took form again.

“What a hot day it was!” Fay said dreamily, and moved her shoulders. “Damp and thundery, but so hot! Mr. Brooke asked me after breakfast, privately, whether I would meet him at Henri Quatre's tower about four o'clock. Of course I never dreamed he was going in to the Credit Lyonnais in Chartres and get the famous two thousand pounds.

“I left the house at shortly before three o'clock, just before Mr. Brooke returned from the bank with that money in his brief-case. You see, I can tell you . . . oh, told the police so often afterwards! . . . all the times. I meant to go for a dip in the river, so I took along a bathing-suit. But instead I simply wandered along the river-bank.”

Fay paused.

“When I left that house, Mr. Hammond”―she uttered a strange, far-off kind of laugh―it was outwardly a very peaceful house. Georgina Brooke, that's Harry's mother, was in the kitchen speaking to the cook. Harry was upstairs in his room writing a letter. Harry―poor fellow!―wrote once a week to an old friend of his in England, named Jim Morell.”

Miles sat up.

“Just a minute, Miss Seton!”

“Yes?”

And now she did lift her eyes, with a quick blue glance, startled, as though she were suddenly wondering.

“Was this Jim Morell,” asked Miles, “any relation to a girl named Barbara Morell?”

“Barbara Morell. Barbara Morell.” she repeated it, and the momentary interest died out of her face. “No, I can't say I have any knowledge of the girl. Why do you ask?”

“Because . . . nothing at all! It doesn't matter.”

Fay Seton smoothed at her skirt, as though earnestly occupied in choosing just what words to say. She seemed to find it a delicate business.

“I don't know anything about the murder!” she exclaimed, with delicate insistence. “Over and over I told the police so afterwards! At just before three o'clock I went for a stroll along the river-bank, northwards, and far beyond the tower.

“You've undoubtedly heard what was happening in the meantime. Mr. Brooke returned from the bank and looked for Harry. Since Harry was by that time in the garage instead of his room, Mr. Brooke walked slowly out of the house to keep his appointment with me―miles ahead of time, really―at the tower. Shortly afterwards Harry learned where he had gone, and snatched up his raincoat and followed Mr. Brooke. Mrs. Brooke 'phoned to Georges Rigaud, who drove out there in his car.

“At half-past three . . . I knew that by my wrist-watch . . . I thought it was time for me to stroll back towards the tower, and went inside. I heard voices talking from the direction of the roof. As I started up the stairs I recognized the voices of Harry and his father.”

Fay moistened her lips.

To Miles it seemed, by the subtle alteration in her tone, that she used by force of habit―sincerely, yet glibly―a series of words made familiar to her by repetition.

“No, I did not hear what they were talking about. It is simply that I dislike unpleasantness, and I would not remain. In going out of the tower I met Monsieur Rigaud, who was going in. Afterwards . . . well! I went for my dip after all.”

Miles stared at her.

“for a swim in the river?”

“I felt hot and tired. I believed it would cool me. I undressed in the woods by the river, as many persons do. This was not near the tower; it was well away from the tower, northwards, on the west bank. I swam and floated and dreamed in the cool water. I did not know anything was wrong until I was walking back home at a quarter to five. There was a great clamour of people round the tower, with policemen among them. And Harry walked up to me, putting out his hands, and said, 'My God, Fay, somebody's killed Dad.'”

Her voice trailed away.

Putting up a hand to shade her eyes, Fay shielded her face as well. When she looked at Miles again, it was with a wistful and apologetic smile.

“Please do forgive me!” she said, giving her head that little sideways toss which made the dim yellow light ripple across her hair. “I lived it again, you see. It's a habit lonely people have.”

“Yes. I know.”

“And that's the limit of my knowledge, really. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

Acutely uncomfortable, Miles spread out his hands. “My dear Miss Seton! I'm not here to question you like a public prosecutor!”

“Perhaps not. But I'd rather you did, if you have any doubts.”

Miles hesitated.

“The only thing the police really could urge against me,” she said, “was that most unfortunate swim of mine. I had been in the river. And there were no witnessed who could testify about the part of the tower facing the river: who went near it, or who didn't. Of course it was perfectly absurd that someone―in a bathing-dress: really―could get up a smooth wall forty feet high. They were compelled to see that, eventually. But in the meantime . . .!”

smiling as though the matter were of no importance now, yet shivering a little nevertheless, Fay rose to her feet. She edged forward among the waist-high piles of books, as though impulsively, before changing her mind. Her head was still a little on one side. About her eyes and her mouth there was a passive gentleness, a sweetness, which went straight to Mile's heart. He jumped down from the edge of the window-sill.

“You do believe me?” cried Fay. “Say you believe me!”

Chapter VIII

Miles smiled at her.

“Of course I believe you!”

“Thank you, Mr. Hammond. Only I thought you looked a little doubtful, a little—what shall I call t?”

“It isn't that. It's only that Professor Rigaud's account was more of less cut off in the middle, and there were certain things that kept tormenting me. What was the official police view of the whole matter?”

“They finally decided it was suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I suppose, really,” and Fay lifted her thin-arched eyebrows in a timidly whimsical way, “it was because they couldn't find any other explanation. That verdict saved their faces.” She hesitated. “And it's true that Mr. Brooke's fingerprints, and only Mr. Brooke's fingerprints, were on the handle of the sword-stick?”

“Oh, yes. I even saw the infernal thing.”

“The police surgeon, a nice funny little man named Doctor Pommard, almost had a fit whenever he thought of the verdict. He gave some technicalities, which I'm afraid I don't understand, to show that the angle of the wound was very nearly impossible for a suicide: certainly impossible unless Mr. Brooke had held the weapon by the blade instead of by the handle. All the same . . .” She lifted her shoulders.

“But wait a minute!” protested Miles. “As I understand it, the brief-case with the money was missing?”

“Yes. That's true.”

“If nobody got up on top of the tower to stab Mr. Brooke, what did they think had happened to the brief-case?”

Fay looked away from him.

“They thought,” she replied, “that in Mr. Brooke's dying convulsion he—he had somehow knocked it off the parapet into the river.”

“Did they drag the river?”

“Yes. Immediately.”

“And they didn't find t?”

“Not then . . . or ever.”

Fay's head was bent forward, her eyes on the floor.

“And it wasn't for want of trying!” she cried out softly. The tips of her fingers brushed across books and left streaks in the dust. “That affair was the sensation of France during the first winter of the war. Poor Mrs. Brooke died during that winter; they say she died of grief. Harry, as I told you, was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.

“Then the Germans came. They were always glad of any excuse to give publicity to a sensational murder case, especially one that had—that had a woman's immorality concerned in it, because they believed it kept the French public amused and out of mischief. Oh, they saw to it that popular curiosity didn't lapse!”

“I gather,” said Miles, “that you were caught in the invasion? You didn't come back to England before then?”

“No,” answered Fay. “I was ashamed.”

Miles turned away from her, turned his back to her, and fiercely struck his fist on the window-sill.

“We've talked about this long enough,” he declared.

“Please! It's perfectly all right.”

“It's not all right!” Miles stared grimly out of the window. “I hereby give you my solemn promise that this subject is finished; tat I will never refer to it again; that I will never ask you another ques—” He stopped. “You didn't marry Harry Brooke, then?”

Reflected in the little panes of the windows, black illuminated glass, he saw her begin to laugh before he heard a sound. He saw Fay throw back her head and shoulders, he saw the white throat working, the closed eyes and the tensely out-thrown arms, before her almost hysterical laughter choked and sobbed and rang in the quiet library, dazing him with its violence from so passive a girl.

Miles swung round. Over him, penetrating to his inner heart, flowed such a wave of sympathy and protectiveness—dangerously near love—that it unstrung his nerves. He blundered towards her, putting out his hand. He knocked over a toppling heap of books, with a crash and drift of dust which floated up against the dim light, just as Marion Hammond opened the door and came in.

“Do you two,” inquired Marion's common-sense voice, cutting off emotion as a string is snapped, “do you two have any idea what time it is?”

Miles stood still, breathing rapidly. Fay Seton also stood still, as placid-faced now as she had ever been. That outburst might have been an illusion seen in glass or heard in a dream.

Yet there was a sense of strain even about the bright-eyed, brisk-looking Marion.

“It's nearly half-past eleven,” she went on. “Even if Miles wants to stay up for most of the night, as he generally does, I've got to see to it that all of us don't lose our sleep.”

“Marion, for the love of . . .!”

Marion cooed at him.

“Now don't be snappish, Miles. Can you imagine,” she appealed to Fay, “can you imagine how he can be almost too sympathetic towards everyone else in the world, and yet an absolute beast to me?”

“I expect most brothers are like that, really.”

“Yes. Maybe you're right.” Wearing a house-apron, trim and sturdy and black-haired, Marion wormed with dislike and distrust through the morass of books. With a firm managing gesture she picked up Fay's lamp and pressed it into her guest's hand.

“I like my lovely present so much,” she told Fay cryptically, “that I'm going to give you something in return. Yes, I am! A box of something! It's upstairs in my room now. You run along up and see it, and I'll join you in just one moment; and afterwards I'm going to send you straight downstairs to bed. You—you know your way?”

Holding up the lamp, Fay smiled back at her.

“Oh, yes! I think I could find my way anywhere in the house. It's awfully kind of you to . . . to . . .”

“Nor at all, my dear! Run along!”

“Good night, Mr. Hammond.”

Giving Miles a backward glance, Fay closed the door as she went out. With only one lamp left, it was a little difficult to see Marion's face as she stood over there in the gloom. Yet, even an outsider would have realized that a state of emotion, a dangerous state of emotion, was already gathering in this house. Marion spoke gently.

“Miles, old boy!”

“Yes?”

“It was frightfully overdone, you know.”

“What was?”

“You know what I mean.”

“On the contrary, me dear Marion, I haven't the remotest idea what you're talking about,” said Miles. He roared this out in what he recognized to be a pompous and stuffed-shirt manner; he knew this, he knew that Marion knew it, and it was beginning to make him angry. “Unless it by any chance means you've been listening at the door?”

“Miles, don't be so childish!”

“Would you mind explaining that rather offensive remark?” He strode towards her, sending books flying. “What is actually means, I suppose, is that you don't like Fay Seton?”

“That's where you're wrong. I do like her! Only . . .”

“Go on, please.”

Marion looked rather helpless, lifting her hands and then dropping them against the house-apron.

“You get angry with me, Miles, because I'm practical and you're not. I can't help being practical. That's how I'm made.”

“I don't criticize you. Why should you criticize me?”

“It's for your own good, Miles! Even Steve—and heaven knows, Miles, I love Steve a very great deal—!”

“Steve ought to be practical enough for you.”

“Under that moustache and that slowness, Miles, he's nervy and romantic and a bit like you. Maybe all men are; don't know. But Steve rather likes being bossed, whereas you won't be bossed in any circumstances . . .”

“No, by God I won't!”

“. . . or even take a word of advice, which you must admit is silly of you. Anyway, let's not quarrel! I'm sorry brought the subject up.”

“Listen, Marion.” He had himself under control. He spoke slowly, and thoroughly believed every word he was saying. “I've got no deep personal interest in Fay Seton, if that's what you think. I'm academically interested in a murder case. A man was killed on top of a tower where nobody, NOBODY, could possibly have come near him—”

“All right, Miles. Don't forget to lock up before you go to bed, dear. Good night.”

There was a strained silence between them as Marion moved towards the door. It irked Miles; it chafed his conscience.

“Marion!”

“Yes, my dear?”

“No offense, old girl?”

Her eye twinkled. “Of course not, stupid! And I do like your Fay Seton, in a way. Only, Miles: as for your floating murderers and things that can walk on air—I only wish I could meet one of them, that's all!”

“As a matter of scientific interest, Marion, what would you do if that did happen?”

“Oh, I don't know. Shoot at it with a revolver, I suppose. Be sure to lock up, Miles, and don't go wandering away into the forest with all the doors wide open. Good night!”

And the door closed after her.

For a little while after she had gone, turning over unruly thoughts, Miles stood motionless. In a mechanical way he picked up and replaced the books he had knocked over.

What had these women got against Fay Seton, anyway? Last night, for instance, Barbara Morell had practically warned him against Fay—or had she? There was a good deal in Barbara's behaviour he could not fit into any pattern. He could only be sure that she was emotionally upset. Fay, on the other hand, had denied knowing Barbara Morell; though Fay had mentioned, with a sharp hinting insistence, some man of the same surname . . .

“Jim Morell.” That was it.

Damn it all!

Miles Hammond swung himself up again to st on the window-ledge. Glancing behind at the darkling shape of the New Forest pressing up to within twenty yards of the house, he saw its darkness and breathed its fragrance as a balm for fever. And so, pushing one of the swinging lights wider open, he slid through and jumped down outside.

To breathe this dew-scented dimness was like a weight off the lungs. He climbed up the little grass slope of the terrace to the open space between here and the line of the forest. A few feet below him now lay the long narrow side of the house; he could see into the library, into the dark dining-room, into the sitting-room with ts low-glimmering lamp, then the dark reception hall. Most of the other rooms at Greywood were bedrooms, chiefly unused and in a bad state of repair.

He glanced upwards and to his left. Marion's bedroom was at the rear of the house, over the library. The bedroom windows on the side facing him—eastwards—were covered with curtains. But its rear windows, looking south towards another loom of the encircling woods, threw out dim yellow light the edge of whose reflection he could see as it touched the trees. Though Miles was out of sight of these rear windows, that yellow light lay plain enough at the corner of his eye. And, as he watched, a woman's shadow slowly passed across it.

Marion herself? Or Fay Seton talking to her before she retired?

It was all right!

Muttering to himself, Miles swung round and walked northwards towards the front of the house. It was a bit chilly; he might at least have brought a raincoat. But the singing silence, the hint of moonrise beginning to make a white dawn behind the trees, at once soothed and exalted him.

He walked down to the open space in front of Greywood. Just before him lay the stream spanned by the rustic bridge. Miles went out on the bridge, leaned against its railing, and stood listening to the little whispering noises of the water at night. He might have stood there for twenty minutes, lost in thoughts where a certain face kept obtruding, when the jarring bump of a motor-car roused him.

The car, approaching unseen through the trees in the direction of the main road, jolted to a stop on gravel. Two men got out of it, one of them carrying an electric torch. As they piled up on foot towards the rustic bridge, Miles could see in outline tat one of them was short and stoutish, bouncing along with quick little inward-turning steps. The other was immensely tall and immensely fat, his long dark cape making him appear even more vast; he strode along with a rolling motion like an emperor, and the sound of his throat-clearing preceded him like a war-cry.

The smaller man, Miles saw, was Professor Georges Antoine Rigaud. And the immense man was Miles' friend, Dr. Gideon Fell.

He called out their names in astonishment, and both of them stopped.

Dr. Fell, absent-mindedly turning the light of the torch on his own face as he whirled it round to seek the source of the voice, stood briefly revealed as being even more ruddy of face and vacant of eye than Miles remembered him. His several chins were drawn in as though for argument. His eyeglasses on the broad black ribbon were stuck wildly askew on his nose. His big mop of grey-streaked hr seemed to quiver with argument like the bandit's moustache. So he stood peering round, huge and hatless, in every direction except the right one.

“ I'm here, Dr. Fell! On the bridge! Walk forward.”

“Oh, ah!” breathed Dr. Fell.

He came rolling forward majestically, swinging a cane, and towered over Miles as his footsteps thundered and shook on the planks of the bridge.

“Sir,” intoned Dr. Fell, adjusting his eyeglasses as he peered down like a very large djinn taking form, “good evening. You may safely trust two men of—harrumph--mature years and academic pursuits to do something utterly harebrained. I refer, of course . . .”

Again the planks of the bridge quivered.

Rigaud, like a barking little terrier, achieved the feat of worming past Dr. Fell's bulk. He stood gripping the railing of the bridge, staring at Miles with that same inextinguishable curiosity in his face.

“Professor Rigaud,” said Miles, “I owe you an apology. I meant to ring you up this morning; I honestly meant it. But I didn't know where you were staying in London, and . . .”

The other breathed quickly.

“Young man,” he replied, “you owe me no apology. No, no, no! It is I who owe you one.”

“What's that?”

“Justement!” said Professor Rigaud, nodding very rapidly. “Last night I had my merry joke. I teased and tantalized the minds of you and Mees Morell until the very last. Is it not so?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. But—”

“Even when you mentioned casually that you sought after a librarian, young man, it struck me as no more than an amusing coincidence. I never guessed, not I , that this woman was within five hundred miles of here! I never knew—never!—that the lady was in England!”

“You mean Fay Seton?”

“I do.”

Miles moistened his lips.

“But this morning,” pursued Professor Rigaud, “comes Mees Morell, who does ring up on the telephone with confused and incoherent explanations about last night. Mees Morell further tells me that she knows Fay Seton is in England, knows her address, and believes the lady may be sent to you for employment. A call to the Berkeley Hotel, tactfully made, confirms this.” He nodded over his shoulder. “You see that motor-car?”

“What about it?”

“I have borrowed it from a friend of mine, a Whitehall official, who has the petrol. I have broken the law to come and tell you. You must find some polite excuse to get this lady away from your house at once.”

White glimmered Professor Rigaud's face under the rising moon, his patch of moustache no longer comical and a desperate seriousness in his manner. Under his left arm he gripped the thick yellow sword-stick with which Howard Brooke had been stabbed. Long afterwards Miles Hammond remembered the tinkling stream, the loom of Dr. Fell's huge outline, the stout little Frenchman with his right hand holding tightly to the railing of the bridge. Now Miles took a step backwards.

“Not you too?”

Professor Rigaud's eyebrows went up.

“I do not understand.”

“Candidly, Professor Rigaud, every single person has been warning me against Fay Seton. And I'm getting damned sick and tired of it!”

“It is true, of course? You did engage the lady?”

“Yes! Why not?”

Professor Rigaud's quick eyes moved over Mile's shoulder toward the house in the background.

“Who else is here tonight besides yourself?”

“Only my sister Marion.”

“No servants? No other person?”

“Not for tonight, no. But what difference does that make? What is all this? Why shouldn't I ask Miss Seton to come here and stay as long as she likes?”

“Because you will die,” answered the other simply. “You and your sister will both die.”

Chapter IX

Even more white, very white, glimmered Rigaud's face under the rising moon, whose light now touched the water beneath them.

“Will you come with me, please?” Miles said curtly.

And he turned round and led the way back towards the house.

Towards the western side of Greywood lay the broad flat stretch of lawn, as close-clipped as a bowling green, where you could dimly make out the wicker chairs, the little table, and the bright-canopied garden swing. Miles glanced towards that side of the house as he walked. No lights showed there, though Fay Seton had been given a bedroom on the ground floor. Fay must have turned in.

Miles led the way round to the east side, through the reception-hall which housed his uncle's little collection of mediaeval arms, and into the long sitting-room. This sitting-room was a pleasant place of tapestry chairs, low white-painted bookshelves, and a small Leonardo in oils above the mantelpiece. Only one lamp burned there as a night-light, with a very tiny flame which made immense shadows; but Miles had no wish to make it brighter.

In the hush of the New Forest at past midnight, he swung round.

“I think I ought to tell you,” he said in a louder voice than was necessary, “that I've already had a long talk with Miss Seton . . .”

Professor Rigaud stopped short. “She told you?”

(Steady, now! No reason at all to have a lump in your throat or a furiously hammering heart!)

“She told m about the facts of Mr. Brook's death, yes. The police eventually decided it was suicide, because only Mr. Brooke's fingerprints were on the handle of the swordstick. Is that true?”

“It is.”

“And, at the time of—at the time it happened, Fay Seton had gone for a swim in the river some distance away from the tower. Is that true?”

“As far as it goes,” Professor Rigaud nodded, “yes. But did she tell you about the young man Pierre Fresnac? The son of Jules Fresnac?”

“Need we,” Miles almost shouted, “need we be so infernally censorious nowadays? After all! If there did happen to be anything between this young man Fresnac and Fay Seton . . .”

“The English,” breathed Professor Rigaud in a tone of awe. And then, after a pause: “My God, the English!”

He stood staring back in a light so dim as to take away expression, with Dr. Fell's big shape behind him. He propped the yellow sword-cane against the arm of a tapestry chair, and removed his hat. There was something in the tone of his voice, not a loud voice, which twitched along Miles' nerves.

“You are like Howard Brooke,” breathed Professor Rigaud. “I say one thing, and you think I mean only . . .”

Again he paused.

“Do you think it likely, young man,” he went on with a sort of pounce, “that a peasant farmer of Eure-et-Loire would care two sous, would care that,” he snapped his fingers, “about a little affair of the passions between his son and a lady of the district? It would only amuse him, if in fact h noticed it at all. It would not, I assure you, start the thunder-storm which swept with terror every peasant in that district. It would not make Jules Fresnac throw a stone at the woman in a public road.”

“What was it, then?”

“Can you cast your mind back to the days just before Howard Brooke's death?”

“I can.”

“This young man, Pierre Fresnac, lived with his parents in a stone farmhouse off the road between Chartres and Le Mans. It is necessary to emphasize that his bedroom was in an attic up three flights of stairs.”

“Well?”

“For some days Pierre Fresnac had been ill, had been weak, had been dazed. Partly because he dared not speak, partly because he did not understand and thought it was all a nightmare, he said nothing to anyone. Like all young people, he was frightened of being thrashed for something that was not his fault. So he bound a scarf round his neck and said not a word.

“He thought it was a dream when he saw, night after night, the white face floating outside the upstairs window. He thought it was a dream when he saw the body taking form in the air metres above ground, and felt the anaesthesia that dims the mind and muscles as that lamp is dimmed when you turn down the wick. It was his father, presently, who tore away the bandage from the throat. And they found the sharp teethmarks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away.”

As though from a distance Miles heard his own voice.

“Are you crazy?”

“No.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes,” said Professor Rigaud. “I mean the vampire. I mean the un-dead. I mean the drainer of bodies and killer of souls.”

The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window.

The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window . . .

In spite of himself Miles couldn't laugh. He tried to do so, but the sound stuck in his throat.

“The good simple-minded Mr. Howard Brooke,” said Professor Rigaud, “understood nothing of this. He saw in it only a vulgar intrigue between a peasant lad and a woman older than the boy. He was shocked to the very depths of his British soul. He had the simple conviction that any immoral woman can be bought off with money. And so . . .”

“And so?”

“He died. That is all.”

Professor Rigaud shook his bald head, in a very fever and passion of earnestness. He picked up the sword-cane, clutching it under his arm.

“I tried last night . . . alas for my idiotic sense of humour! . . . to tease you with a puzzle. I stated facts quite fairly, if obliquely. I told you that this woman was not, in the accepted sense, a criminal of any kind. I told you truly that in the workaday world she is gentle and even prudish.

“But this does not apply to the soul inside, which she can no more help than I can help greed or inquisitiveness. It does not apply to the soul which can leave the body in trance or sleep, and take form visible to the eye. That soul, like the white face at the upstairs window, feeds on and draws life from the blood of the living.

“If Howard Brooke had told me any of this beforehand, I could have helped him. But no, no, no! This woman is immoral; this must be kept quiet. Perhaps I should have guessed for myself, from the outward signs and from the story I gave you. The physical characteristics, the red hair and the slender figure and the blue eyes, are always in folklore associated with the vampire because in folklore they are signs of eroticism. But as usual I do not recognize what is under my nose. I am left to learn it after Howard Brooke's death, from a mob of peasants who wish to lynch her.”

Miles paused a hand across his forehead and pressed hard.

“But you can't seriously mean this! You can't mean it was this . . . this . . .”

“This thing,” supplied Professor Rigaud.

“This person, let's say. You tell me that Fay Seton killed Howard Brooke?”

“The vampire did. Because the vampire hated him.”

“It was plain murder with a sharp sword-blade! No supernatural agency is involved!”

“How then,” asked Professor Rigaud coolly, “dd the murderer approach and leave his victim?”

Again there was a long silence.

“Listen, my good friend!” cried Miles. “I tell you again, you can't seriously mean this! You, a practical man, can't put forward as an explanation this superstitious . . .”

“No, no, no!” said Professor Rigaud with three separate words like hammer-blows, and suddenly snapped his fingers in the air.

“How do you mean, no?”

“I mean,” returned Professor Rigaud, “it is an argument I often have with my academic colleagues about the word 'superstitious.' Can you dispute the facts I present?”

“Apparently not.”

“Justement! And supposing—I say supposing!—any such creature as a vampire to exist, do you agree that it may explain Fay Seton's every action while she lived with the Brooke family?”

“But look here—!”

“I say to you,” Professor Rigaud's little eye gleamed in a sort of logical frenzy, “I say to you: 'Here are certain facts; please to explain them.' Facts, facts, facts! You reply to me that you cannot explain them, but that I must not—must not, must not!—talk such superstitious nonsense, because the thing I suggest upsets your universe and makes you afraid. You may be right in saying so. You may be wrong in saying so. But it is I who am practical and you who are superstitious.”

He peered round at Dr. Fell.

“You agree, dear doctor?”

Dr. Fell had been standing over against the low line of the white-painted bookshelves, his arms folded under his long box-pleated cape, and his eyes fixed with absent-minded absorption on the dim flame of the lamp. Miles was assured of his presence by a gentle wheezing of breath, with occasional snorts an stoppages as though the doctor had suddenly walked out of a half-dream, and by the flutter of the broad black eyeglass-ribbon when his chest rose and fell.

His face, as ruddy as a furnace, radiated that sort of geniality which as a rule made him tower in heartening comfort like Old King Cole. Gideon Fell, Miles knew, was an utterly kindhearted, utterly honest, completely absent-minded and scatter-brained man whose best hits occurred half through absent-mindedness. His face at the moment, with the under-0lip drawn up and the bandit's moustache drawn down, appeared something of a study in ferocity.

“You agree, dear doctor?” persisted Rigaud.

“Sir—” began Dr. Fell, rearing up with a powerful oratorical flourish like Dr. Johnson. Then he seemed to change his mind; he subsided and scratched his nose.

“Monsieur?” prompted Rigaud with the same formality.

“I do not deny,” said Dr. Fell, sweeping out one arm in a gesture which gravely endangered a bronze statuette on the bookshelves, “I do not deny that supernatural forces may exist in this world. In fact, I firmly believe they do exist.”

“Vampires!” sad Miles Hammond.

“Yes,” agreed Dr. Fell, with a seriousness which made Miles' heart sink. “Perhaps even vampires.”

Dr. Fell's own crutch-handled stick was propped against the bookshelves. But he was now looking, with even more witless vacancy, at the thick yellow sword-cane still clutched under Professor Rigaud's arm.

Wheezing as he lumbered forward, Dr. Fell took the can from Rigaud. He turned it over in his fingers. Holding it in the same absent-minded fashion, he wandered over and sat down—very untidily—in a big tapestry chair by the empty fireplace. The whole room shook as he sat down, though this was a solidly constructed house.

“But I believe,” he pursued, “like any honest psychical researcher, in first of all examining the facts.”

“Monsieur,” cried Professor Rigaud, “I give you facts!”

“Sir,” replied Dr. Fell, “no doubt.”

Scowling, he blinked at the sword-cane. He slowly unscrewed the blade-handle, removed it from the scabbard, and studied it. He held the threads of the handle close to his lopsided eyeglasses, and tried to peer into the scabbard. When the learned doctor spoke again, rousing himself, it was in a voice like a schoolboy.

“I say! Has anybody got a magnifying-glass?”

“There's one here in the house,” answered Miles, who was trying to adjust his mind to this. “But I can't seem to remember where I saw it last. Would you like me to . . .?”

“Candidly speaking,” said Dr. Fell, with an are of guilty frankness, “I'm not sure it would be much good to me. But it makes an impressive picture, and gives the user a magnificent sense of self-importance. Harrumph.” His voice changed. “I think someone said there were bloodstains inside this scabbard?”

Professor Rigaud was almost at the point of jumping up and down on the floor.

“There are bloodstains inside it! I said so last night to Miss Morell and Mr. Hammond. I sad so again to you this morning.” His voice grew challenging: “And then?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Fell, nodding in a slow and lion-like way, “that is still another point.”

Fumbling into his inside coat pocket under the big cape, Dr. Fell drew out a folded sheaf of manuscript. Miles had no difficulty in recognizing it. It was Professor Rigaud's account of the Brooke case, written for the archives of the Murder Club and restored by Miles himself after it had been taken away by Barbara Morell. Dr. Fell weighed it in his hand.

“When Rigaud brought me this manuscript today,” he said in a tone of real reverence, “I read it with a pop-eyed fascination beyond words. O Lord! O Bacchus! This is one for the club! But it does rather prompt a strong question.” His eyes fixed on Miles. “Who is Barbara Morell, and why does she upset the dinner of the Murder Club?”

“Ah!” breathed Professor Rigaud, nodding very rapidly and rubbing his hands together, “That also interests me very much! Who is Barbara Morell?”

Miles stared back at them.

“Hang it, don't look at me! I don't know!”

Professor Rigaud's eyebrows went up. “Yet one remembers that you accompanied her home?”

“Only as far as the Underground station, that's all.”

“You did not, perhaps, discuss this matter?”

“No. That is—no.”

The stout little Frenchman had a very disconcerting eye.

“Last night,” Professor Rigaud said to Dr. Fell, after a long scrutiny of Miles, “this little Mees Morell is several times very much upset. Yes! The one obvious thing is that she is much concerned about Fay Seton, and undoubtedly knows her very well.

“On the contrary,” said Miles. “Miss Seton denies ever having met Barbara Morell, or knowing anything about her.”

It was as though you had struck a gong for silence. Professor Rigaud's expression was almost ghoulish.

“She told you this?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Tonight, in the library, when I—asked her about things.”

“So!” breathed Professor Rigaud, with an are of refreshed interest. “You, among her victims”—the word struck Miles like a blow in the face— “you, among her victims, at least have courage! You introduced the subject and questioned her about it?”

“I didn't exactly introduce the subject, no.”

“She volunteered the information?”

“Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

“Sir,” said Dr. Fell, sitting back in the chair with the manuscript and sword-cane across his knees and a very curious expression on his face, “it would help me enormously—by thunder, how it would help me!—if you told me here, at this moment (forgive me) without prejudice and without editing.”

It must, Miles thought, be growing very late. Such an intensity of stillness held the house that he imagined he could hear a clock strike far back in the kitchen. Marion would be fast asleep, up there over the library; Fay Seton would be fast asleep downstairs. Through the windows moonlight strengthened with deathly pallor, dimming the mere spark of the lamp and rearing on the opposite wall shadow-images of the little oblong panes.

Miles began to speak out of a dry throat, slowly and carefully. Only once did Dr. Fell interrupt with questions.

“'Jim Morell!'” the doctor repeated, so sharply that Professor Rigaud jumped. “A great friend of Harry Brooke, to whom Harry regularly wrote once a week.” He turned his big head towards Rigaud. “Were you acquainted with any James Morell?”

Rigaud, perched on the edge of a side-table, bending forward eagerly with his hand cupped behind his ear, returned a violent negative.

“To the best of my knowledge, dear doctor, this name is completely new to me.”

“Harry Brooke never even mentioned him to you?”

“Never.”

“Nor”—Dr. Fell tapped the manuscript—“is he mentioned in this admirably clear narrative of yours. Even the attached affidavits, of other witnesses concerned, make no reference to him. Yet Harry Brooke was writing to him on the very day—” Dr. Fell was silent for a moment. Was it an effect of the light, that momentary expression about his eyes? “Never mind!” he said. “Go on!”

Yet Miles saw the same expression there again, briefly, before he finished his story. Dr. Fell's look had been that of a man dazed, startled, half blinking at the sight of truth, and yet in it there were elements of sheer horror. That was what was so unnerving. All the time that Miles went on speaking mechanically, frantic thoughts ran across the inner screen of his mind.

Dr. Fell couldn't believe, of course, in this nonsense about vampires. Professor Rigaud might sincerely credit the reality of evil spirits inhabiting flesh, evil spirits that could leave the body and materialize high in the air, with their white faces outside windows.

But not Dr. Fell. That could be taken for granted! All Miles wanted was to hear him say so.

All Miles wanted was a word, a gesture, a twinkle in the eye, which should blow away this poisonous mist which Georges Antoine Rigaud would call the mist of the vampire. “Come, now! Come now! Archons of Athens!”--in uproarious delight. A twitch of the several chins, a shaking of the huge waistcoat, the old-time familiar amusement as Gideon Fell rolled back in the chair, hammering the ferrule of a stick against the floor.

And Miles was not getting that word.

Instead, as Miles finished speaking, Dr. Fell sat back with a hand shading his eyes, and the bloodstained sword-stick across his lap.

“That is all?” he inquired.

“Yes. That's all.”

“Oh, ah. And to you, my friend”--Dr Fell had to clear his throat powerfully before he addressed Rigaud—“I should like to put a vitally important question.” He held up the manuscript. “When you wrote this, of course, you chose your words with care?”

Professor Rigaud drew himself up stiffly.

“Is it necessary to say that I did?”

“You wouldn't wish to change any of it?”

“No, I assure you! Why should I?”

“Let me read you,” sad Dr. Fell persuasively, “two or three lines from your account of the last time you saw Mr. Howard Brooke, on top of the tower, before he was attacked.”

“Well?”

Dr. Fell moistened his thumb, adjusted his eyeglasses on the black ribbon, and leafed back through the manuscript.

“'Mr. Brooke,'” he read aloud. “'was standing by the parapet, his back uncompromisingly turned. On one side of him—'”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” said Miles, “but those sound like exactly the same words Professor Rigaud used last night when he was telling it instead of writing it.”

“They are the same words,” smiled Professor Rigaud. “it flowed trippingly, yes? It was memorized. Anything I spoke to you, young man, will also be found in that manuscript. Continue, continue, continue!”

Dr. Fell eyed him curiously.

“'On one side oh him'—you are still describing Mr. Brooke—' on one side of him his cane, of light yellowish-coloured wood, was propped upright against the parapet. On the other side of him, also resting against the parapet, was the bulging brief-case. Round the tower-top this battlemented parapet ran breast-high, its stone broken, crumbling, and scored with whitish hieroglyphics where people had cut their initials.'”

Dr. Fell closed up the manuscript and tapped it again.

“That,” he demanded, “is all accurate?”

“But perfectly accurate!”

“Only one other small thing,” begged Dr. Fell. “It's about this sword-stick. You say in your lucid account that the police, after the murder took away the two halves of the sword-stick for expert examination. I presume the police didn't ft them together before removing them? They were taken away just as found?”

“But naturally!”

Miles couldn't stand it any longer.

“For God's sake, sir, let's get things straight! Let's know at least what we think and where we are!” His voice went up.

“You don't believe all this, do you?”

Dr. Fell blinked at him. “Believe what?”

“Vampires!”

“No,” Dr. Fell said gently. “ don't believe it.”

(Miles had known it all along, of course. He told himself this, with a small inner laugh, while he settled his mental shoulders and prepared to laugh aloud. But the breath rushed out of his lungs, and he felt a hot wave of relief over his whole body at the realization that there could be no terrors now.)

“It is only far to say that,” Dr. Fell went on gravely, “before we leave. This wild night ride to the New Forest, on a—harrumph!—a sudden romantic impulse of Rigaud's, who also wanted to see your uncle's library, is one that two elderly gentlemen will regret when they arrive back in London. But before we do go . . .”

“By the powers of all evil,” said Miles with some vehemence, “you're not going back tonight?”

“Not going back tonight?”

“I'm going to put you up here,” said Miles, “in spite of the shortage of habitable bedrooms. I want to see you both in daylight and feel sane again. And my sister Marion! When she hears the rest of my story . . .!”

“Your sister already knows something about it?”

“A little, yes. Come to think of it, I asked her tonight what she would do if she met a . . . well, a supernatural horror that could walk on air. And that was even before I'd heard the vampire story.”

“Indeed!” murmured Dr. Fell. “And what did she say she would do?”

Miles laughed.

“She sad she'd probably fire a revolver at it. The only sensible thing is to be just as amused as Marion was.” He bowed to Professor Rigaud. “I thank you deeply, sir, for coming all this distance to put me on my guard against a vampire with white face and blood-bedabbled mouth. But it seems to me that Fay Seton as had a bad enough time already. And I scarcely think . . .”

He broke off.

The sound they all heard then came from upstairs and a little distance away. But it was magnified by the night stillness. It was shattering and unmistakable. It made Professor Rigaud stiffen as he sat on the edge of the little side-table. It caused a twitch through Dr. Fell's vast bulk, so that his eyeglasses tumbled off his nose and the pieces of the sword-cane slowly slid to the floor. All three men were motionless, not lifting a hand. It was the sound of a pistol-shot.

Chapter X

Professor Rigaud spoke first, kicking his heels. The sardonic expression flickered in his face before it was veiled, and he looked at Miles.

“Yes, my friend?” he suggested politely. “I beg of you to continue this interesting statement! Your sister is amused, much amused, when she thinks of . . .” But he could not keep on in this strain. His gruff voice grew shaky as he glanced at Dr. Fell. “Are you, dear doctor, thinking what I am thinking?”

“No!” thundered Dr. Fell, and broke the tensity. “No, no, no, no!”

Professor Rigaud shrugged his shoulders.

“For myself, I find it seldom helpful to call a thing improbable after it has actually happened.” He looked at Miles. “Does you sister own a revolver?”

“Yes! But . . .”

Miles got to his feet.

He wouldn't, he said to himself, make a disgraceful exhibition of himself by starting to run: though Rigaud's countenance was a mottled white and even Dr. Fell had close his hands suddenly round the arms of the tapestry chair. Miles walked out of the room into the dark reception-hall. It was on the staircase, the enclose staircase leading to the upstairs hall, that he did begin to run.

“Marion!” he shouted.

Ahead of him upstairs lay the very long, narrow hall, touched by the yellow speck of a night-light, with its line of mute-looking closed doors on either side.

“Marion! Are you all right?”

There was no reply.

As he faced the rear of the hall, the door of Marion's bedroom was the last door down on the left. Again Miles started to run. He stopped long enough to pick up the night-light, another little lamp with a cylindrical glass shade, from the top of the radiator half-way down. As he patiently fumbled with the wheel of the wick to make it burn brighter, he discovered that his hands were trembling. He turned the know of the door, pushed it open, and held the lamp high.

“Marion!”

Marion was in bed, partly reclining upwards with her head and shoulders pressed back against the headboard of the bed, in an otherwise empty room. The lamp shook crazily, but I showed him that.

There were two lines of little windows in this room. One line faced eastwards, opposite Miles as he stood in the doorway, and these were still covered by drawn curtains. The other line of windows faced the south, towards the back of the house, and white moonlight poured in. As Marion lay in bed—or half lay in bed, shoulders uphunched—she was facing straight towards these southern windows across the length of the room.

“Marion!”

She didn't move.

Miles went forward, edged forward with little slow steps. As the line of light shook and crept on, farther and farther into a blur of gloom, it brought out one detail after another.

Marion, wearing light-blue silk pyjamas in a tumbled bed, had not quite drawn up to a sitting position against the headboard o the bed. At first glance her face was almost unrecognizable. The hazel eyes were partly open, glassy and unblinking when the light touched them. The face was chalk white. Moisture glimmered on her forehead under the lamp. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth for the scream she had never been able to utter.

And in her right hand Marion clutched a .32 calibre Ives-Grant revolver. As Miles glanced towards the right, towards the windows Marion Faced, he could see the bullet-hole in the glass.

And so Miles stood there mute, a pulse vibrating down his whole arm, when a rather hoarse voice spoke behind him.

“You will permit me?” it said.

Georges Antoine Rigaud, pale but stolid, bounced in with little pigeon-toed steps, holding up the sitting-room lamp from downstairs. At Marion's right hand there was a bedside table: its drawer partly open, as though the revolver had come from there. On this little table—Miles noticed such details with a kind of maniacal abstraction—stood Marion's own bedside lamp, turned out long ago, and beside the water-bottle a tiny one-ounce bottle of French perfume with a red-and-gold label. Miles could catch the scent of perfume. It made him half sick

Professor Rigaud put down the sitting-room lamp on this table.

“I am an amateur of medicine,” he said. “You will permit!”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

circling round to the other side of the bed, catlike of movement, Professor Rigaud picked up Marion's limp left wrist. Her whole body looked limp, limp and flat-weighted. Delicately he pressed his hand under her left breast, high up against the region of the heart. A spasm went across Professor Rigaud's face. He had lost all his sardonic air; he showed only deep and genuine distress.

“I am sorry,” he announced. “This lady is dead.”

Dead.

This wasn't possible.

Miles could not hold up the lamp any longer; his arm trembled too violently; in another second he would let the whole thing fall. Hardly conscious of his own legs, he moved over towards a chest-of-drawers at the right-hand side of the southern windows, and set down the lamp with a bang.

Then he turned back to face Professor Rigaud across the bed.

“What”--he swallowed--”what did it?”

“Shock.”

“Shock? You mean . . .”

“It is medially correct,” said Professor Rigaud, “ to speak of death from fright. The heart (you follow me?) is suddenly deprived of its power to pump blood up to the brain. The blood sinks into, and remains stagnant in, the large veins of the abdomen. You note the pallor? And the perspiration? And the relaxed muscles?”

Miles was not listening.

He loved Marion, really loved her in that thoughtless way we feel towards those we have known for twenty-eight out of our thirty-five years. He thought of Marion, and he thought of Steve Curtis.

“What follows,” sad Professor Rigaud, “is collapse and death. In severe cases . . .” Then an almost rightful change came over his face, making the patch of moustache stand out.

“Ah, God!” he shouted, with a cry which was no less heartfelt for being accompanied by a melodramatic gesture. “I forgot! I forgot! I forgot!”

Miles stared at him.

“This lady,” said Professor Rigaud, “may NOT be dead.”

“What was that?”

“In severe cases,” gabbled the professor, “there is no perceptible pulse. And there my not be any cardiac impulse—no!--even when you put your hand over the heart.” He paused. “It is not a good hope; but it is possible. How far away is the nearest doctor?”

“About six miles>”

“Can you 'phone him? Is there a 'phone here?”

“Yes! But in the meantime . . .!”

“In the meantime,” replied Professor Rigaud, his eyes feverish as he rubbed at his forehead, “we must stimulate the heart. That is it! Stimulate the heart!” He squeezed up his eyes, thinking. “Elevate the limbs, pressure on the abdominal cavity, and . . . Have you got any strychnine in the house”

“Great Scott, no!”

“But you have salt, yes? Ordinary table-salt! And a hypodermic needle?”

“I think Marion did have a hypodermic somewhere. I think . . .”

where before everything had gone in a rush, now time seeded to have stopped. Every movement seemed intolerably slow. When it was vitally necessary to hurry, you could not hurry.

Miles turned back to the chest-of-drawers, yanked open the topmost drawer, and began to rummage. On top of the maple-wood chest, brilliantly lighted now by the lamp he ha put down there, stood a folding leather photograph-frame containing two large photographs. One side showed Steve Curtis, with a hat on to conceal his baldness; the other side showed Marion broad-faced and smiling, far away from the pitiable mass of flesh now vacant-eyed on the bed.

It seemed to Miles minutes, and was probably fifteen seconds, before he found the hypodermic syringe in two pieces in its neat leather case.

“Take it downstairs,” his companion was gabbling at him, “and sterilize it in boiling water. Then heat some other water with a little pinch of salt in it, and bring them both up here. But first of all 'phone the doctor. I will take the other measures. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

In the doorway of the bedroom, as Miles ran for it, stood Dr. Gideon Fell. He had one last glimpse of those two, Dr. Fell and Professor Rigaud, as he hurried out into the hall. Rigaud, who was taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, spoke with a pounce.

“You see this, dear doctor?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“Can you guess what she saw outside the window?”

Their voices faded away.

Downstairs in the sitting-room it was dark except for a splendour of moonlight. At the telephone Miles snapped on his pocket lighter, finding the address-pad Marion kept there along with two London telephone directories, and dialled Cadnam 4321. He had never met Dr. Garvice, even in his uncle's time; but a voice over the wire asked quick questions and got reasonably clear replies.

A minute later he was in the kitchen: which was situated on the west side of the house, across a long enclosed passage like the one upstairs, in the middle of a line of silent bedrooms. Miles lit several lamps in the big scrubbed room. He set the gas hissing in the new white-enamel range. He ran water into saucepans and banged them on the fire dropping in the two parts of hypodermic, while a big white-faced clock ticked on the wall.

Twenty minutes to two o'clock.

Eighteen minutes to two o'clock . . .

Lord in heaven, wouldn't that water ever boil?

He refused to think of Fay Seton, sleeping on the ground floor in a bedroom not twenty feet away from him now.

He refused to think of her, that is, until he abruptly swung round from the stove and saw Fay standing in the middle of the kitchen behind him, with her finger-tips on the table.

Behind her the door to the passage gaped open on blackness. He hadn't heard her move on the stone floor with the linoleum over it. She was wearing a very thin white nightdress with a pink quilted wrap drawn over it, and white slippers. Her fleecy red hair lay tumbled about her shoulders. Her pink finger-nails tapped, softly and shakily, on the scrubbed top of the table.

What warned Miles was a kind of animal instinct, a nearness, a physical sense he always experienced with her. He turned with such suddenness that he knocked against the handle of the saucepan, which spun round on the gas-ring. The heating water hissed slightly at its edges.

And he surprised on Fay Seton's face a look of sheer hatred.

The blue eyes had a shallow blaze, the colour was high against the white skin; the lips were dry and a little drawn back. It was hatred mingled with—yes! With wild anguish. Even when he turned round she couldn't quite control it, couldn't smooth it away: though her breast rose and fell in a kind of gasp, and her finger-tips twitched together.

But she spoke gently.

“What . . . happened?”

Tick—tick, went the big clock on the wall, tick—tick, four times in measured beats against the silence, before Miles answered her. He could hear the hiss of the steaming water in the saucepan.

“My sister may be dead or dying.”

“Yes. I know.”

“You know?”

“I heard something like a shot. I was only dozing. I went up and looked in there.” Fay breathed this very rapidly, and gave another gasp; she seemed to be making an effort, as though force of will might control blood and nerves, to keep the colour out of her face. “You must forgive me,” she sad. “I've just seen something I hadn't noticed before.”

“Seen something?”

“Yes. What—happened?”

“Marion was frightened by something outside the window. She fired a shot at it.”

“What was it? A burglar?”

“No burglar on earth could scare Marion. She isn't what you could call a nervous type. Besides . . .”

“Please tell me!”

“The windows of that room”--Miles saw it vividly, with its blue, gold-figured curtains, and ts yellow-brown carpet, and its big wardrobe and its dressing-table and its chest-of-drawers, and the easy-chair by the fireplace in the same wall as the door--”the windows of that room are more than fifteen feet above ground. There's nothing underneath but the blank back-wall of the library. I don't see how any burglar could have got up there.”

The water began to boil. Through Miles' mind flashed the word “salt”' he had completely forgotten that salt. He plunged across to the line of kitchen cupboards, and found a big cardboard container. Professor Rigaud had said only a “pinch” of salt; and he had said to heat the water, not boil it. Miles dropped a little into the second saucepan just as the first boiled over.

It was as though Fay Seton's knees had started to give way.

There was a kitchen chair by the table. Fay put her hand on the back of it and slowly sat down' not looking at him, one white knee a little advanced, and the line of her shoulders tense.

The sharp teeth marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away . . .

Miles struck at the tap of the gas-range, extinguishing it. Fay Seton sprang to her feet.

“I—I'm awfully sorry! Can I help you?”

“No! Stand back!”

Question and answer were flung across that quiet kitchen, under the ticking clock, in a way that was unspoken acknowledgment. Miles wondered whether his hands were steady enough to handle the saucepans; but he risked it and caught them up.

Fay spoke softly.

“Professor Rigaud is here, isn't he?”

“Yes. Would you mind standing to one side, please?”

“Did you—did you believe what I sad to you tonight? Did you?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” he shouted at her. “But will you please for the love of heaven stand to one side? My sister . . .”

Scalding water splashed over the edge of the saucepan. Fay was now standing with her back to the table, pressed against it; all her self-effacement and timidity of manner gone, straight and magnificent, breathing deeply.

“This can't go on,” she said.

Miles did not look into her eyes at that moment; he dared not. For his sudden impulse, very nearly irresistible, had been to take her in his arms. Harry Brooke had done that, young Harry since dead and rotted. And how many others, in the quiet families where she had gone to live?

Meanwhile . . .

He left the kitchen without looking back at her. From the kitchen the back stairs, opening of this passage, led to the upstairs hall very close to Marion's room. Miles went upstairs in the moonlight, carefully carrying the saucepans. The door of Marion's room stood open about an inch, and he almost barged slap into Professor Rigaud in the aperture.

“I vass coming”--Professor Rigaud's English pronunciation slipped for the first time--”to see what delayed you.”

“Professor Rigaud! Is she . . .?”

“No, no,no! I have brought her to what is called the 'reaction.' She is breathing and I think her pulse is stronger.”

More scalding water slopped over.

“But I cannot tell, yet, whether this will last. Did you 'phone the doctor?”

“Yes. He's on his way now.”

“Good. Give me the kettles there. No, no, no!” said Professor Rigaud, whom emotion inclined towards fussiness. “You will not come in. Recovery from shock is not a pretty sight and besides you will get in my way. Keep out until I tell you.”

He took the saucepans and put them inside on the floor. Then he closed the door in Miles' face.

With a violent uneasy hope welling up even more strongly—men do not talk like that unless they expect recovery—Miles stood back. Moonlight changed and shifted at the back of the hall; and he saw why.

Dr. Gideon Fell, smoking a very large meerschaum pipe, stood beside the window at the end of the hall. The red glow of the pipe-bowl pulsed and darkened, touching Dr. Fell's eyeglasses; a mist of smoke curled up ghostlike past the window.

“You know,” observed Dr. Fell, taking the pipe out of his mouth, “I like that man.”

“Professor Rigaud?”

“Yes. I like him.”

“So do I. And God knows I'm grateful to him.”

“He is a practical man, a thoroughly practical man. Which,” observed Dr. Fell, with a guilty air and several furious puffs at the meerschaum, “it is to be feared you and I are not. A thoroughly practical man.”

“And yet,” said Miles, “he believes in vampires.”

“Harrumph. Yes. Exactly.”

“Let's face it. What do you believe?”

“My dear Hammond,” returned Dr. Fell, puffing out his cheeks and shaking his head with some vehemence, “at the moment I'm dashed if I know. That is what depresses me. Before this present affair,” he nodded towards the bedroom, “before this present affair cam to upset my calculations, I believed I was beginning to have more than a glimmer of light about the murder of Howard Brooke . . .”

“Yes,” said Miles, “I thought you were.”

“Oh, ah?”

“When I was giving you Fay Seton's account of the murder on the tower, the look on your face once of twice was enough to scare anybody. Horror? I don't know! Something like that.”

“Was it?” said Dr. Fell. The pipe pulsed and darkened. “Oh, ah! I remember! But what upset me wasn't the thought of an evil spirit. It was the thought of a motive.”

“A motive for murder?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Fell. “But it led to murder. A motive so damnably evil and cold-hearted that . . .” He paused. Again the pipe pulsed and darkened. “Do you think we could have a word, now, with Miss Seton?”

Chapter XI

“Miss Seton?” Miles repeated sharply.

He could make nothing of Dr. Fell's expression now. It was a mask, fleshy and colourless against the moonlight, veiled by smoke which got into Mile's lungs. Yet the ring in Dr. Fell's voice, the ring of hatred about that motive, had been unmistakable.

“Miss Seton? I suppose so. She's downstairs now.”

“Downstairs?” said Dr. Fell.

“Her bedroom is downstairs.” Miles explained the circumstances and narrated the events of that afternoon. “It's one of the pleasantest rooms in the house; only just redecorated, with the paint hardly dry. But she is up and about, if that's what you mean. She—she heard the shot.”

“Indeed!”

“As a matter of fact, she slipped up here and glanced into Marion's room. Something upset her so much that she isn't quite . . . quite . . .”

“Herself?”

“If you want to put it like that.”

And then Miles rebelled. With human nature as resilient as it is, with Marion (as he conceived) out of danger, it seemed to him that values were readjusting themselves and that common sense could burst out of its prison.

“Dr. Fell,” he said, “let's not be hypnotized. Let's not have a spell thrown over us by Rigaud's ghouls and vampires and witch-women. Granting—even granting—it would have been very difficult for someone to have climbed up outside the windows of Marion's room . . .”

“My dear fellow,” Dr. Fell said gently, “I know nobody climbed up there. See for yourself!”

And he indicated the window beside which they stood.

Unlike most of the windows in the house, which were of the French-casement style, this was an ordinary sash-window. Miles pushed it up, put his head out, and looked towards the left.

The illuminated windows of Marion's room—four little windows set together, with two of their lights open—threw out bright light against pale green at the back of the house. Underneath was a blank wall fifteen feet high. Underneath also, which he had forgotten, ran an unplanted flower-bed nearly as broad as the wall was high: a flower-bed smooth and newly watered, of earth finely crushed and hoed, on which a cat could not have walked without leaving a trace.

But a fury of doggedness persisted in Miles Hammond.

“I still say,” he declared, “we'd better not be hypnotized.”

“How so?”

“We know Marion fired a shot, yes. But how do we know she fired it at something outside the window?”

“Aha!” chortled Dr. Fell, and a kind of glee breathed towards Miles out of pipe-smoke. “My compliments, sir. You are waking up.”

“We don't know it at all,” said Miles. “We only assume it because it came after all this talk of faces floating outside windows. Isn't it much more natural to think she fired at something inside the room? Something perhaps standing in front of her at the foot of the bed?”

“Yes,” Dr. Fell assented gravely, “it is. But don't you see, my dear sir, that this doesn't in the least explain our real problem?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something,” replied Dr. Fell, “frightened you sister. Something which—without Rigaud's timely aid—would quite literally have frightened her to death.”

Dr. Fell spoke with slow, fiery emphasis, stressing every word. His pipe had gone out, and he put it down on the sill of the open window. Even his wheezing breath snorted louder with earnestness.

“Now I want you to think for a moment just what that means. Your sister is not, I take it, a nervous woman?”

“Good Lord, no!”

Dr. Fell hesitated.

“Let me—harrumph--be more explicit. She's not one of those women who say they're not nervous, and laugh at the supernatural in daylight, and then show very different feelings by night?”

A very vivid memory returned to Miles.

“I remember,” he said, “when I was in hospital, Marion and Steve used to come there as often as they could”--how good they'd been, both of them--”with any jokes or stories hey thought would amuse me. One was a haunted house. A friend of Steve's (that's Marion's fiance) found it while he was on Home Guard duty. So they made up a party to go there.”

“With what result?”

“It seems they did find a lot of unexplained disturbances; poltergeist disturbances, not very pleasant. Steve freely confessed he had the wind up, and so did one or two others. But Marion only enjoyed it.”

“Oh, my eye!” breathed Dr. Fell.

He picked up the dead pipe, and put it down again.

“The again I ask you,” Dr. Fell went on earnestly, “to remember the circumstances. Your sister was not touched or physically attacked in any way. All the evidence shows she collapsed of nervous shock because of something she saw.

“Now suppose,” argued Dr. Fell, “this business was not supernatural. Suppose for example, I wish to scare someone by playing ghost. Suppose I clothe myself in white robes, and daub my nose with phosphorescent paint, and stick my head through a window and thunderously say, 'Boo!' to a group of old ladies in a Bournemouth boarding house.

“It may, perhaps, give them quite a start. They may think that dear old Dr. Fell is getting some extraordinary ideas of humour. But would it really scare anyone? Would any rigged-up contrivance, any faked ingenuity of the supernatural, produce nowadays more than a momentary jump? Would it induce that shattering effect which—as we know—drains the blood from the heart and can be as deadly as a knife or a bullet?”

Beating his fist into the palm of his left hand, Dr. Fell broke off apologetically.

“I beg your pardon,” he added. “I did not wish either to make ill-timed jokes or alarm you with fears about your sister. But . . . Archons of Athens!”

And he spread out his hands.

“Yes,” admitted Miles, “I know.”

There was a silence.

“So you observe,” pursued Dr. Fell, “that the previous point you made ceases to be of importance. Your sister, in an excess of terror, fired a shot at something. It may have been outside the window. It may have been inside the room. It may have been anywhere. The point is: what frightened her as much as that?”

Marion's face . . .

“But you don't fall back on the assumption,” cried Miles, “that the whole thing comes back to a vampire after all?”

“I don't know.”

Putting his finger-tips to his temples, Dr. Fell ruffled the edges of the thick mop of grey-streaked hair which had tumbled over one ear.

“Tell me,” he muttered, “is there anything your sister is afraid of?”

“She didn't like the blitzes of the V-weapons. But then neither did anyone else.”

“I think we may safely rule out,” said Dr. Fell, “the entrance of a V-weapon. A threatening burglar wouldn't do? Something of that sort?”

“Definitely not.”

“Having seen something, and partly raised up in bed, she . . . by the way, that revolver in her hand: it does belong to her?”

“The Ives-Grant .32? Oh, yes.”

“And she kept it in the drawer of the bedside table?”

“Presumably. I never noticed where she kept it.”

“Something tells me,” said Dr. Fell, rubbing his forehead, “that we want the emotions and reactions of human beings—if they are human beings. We are going to have an immediate word with Miss Fay Seton.”

It was not necessary to go and find her. Fay, who had dressed herself in the same grey frock as she had worn earlier in the evening, was coming towards them now. In the uncertain light it seemed to Miles that she had put on a great deal of lipstick, which sh did not ordinarily use.