The Sleeping Sphinx

JOHN DICKSON CARR

THE SLEEPING SPHINX

CHAPTER I

The road, so long that it looked narrow, had on its left the thick greenery of Regent's Park and on its right the tall iron railings around St. Katharine's Precinct of St. Katharine's Church. Just beyond, next to St Katharine's, you could see the line of trees which screened from the road a terrace of tall, stately houses looming white through the dusk.

Number 1, Gloucester Gate. He could see it now.

It was the turn of the evening: faintly blue and white, with birds bickering from the direction of the park. The heat of the day still lingered in this avenue which seemed no less rural for being in the middle of London. Donald Holden stopped in his slow walk, and gripped his hand around one of the bars of the fence. Panic? Something very like it, at least

Of all the ways in which he had pictured his home coming —and there had been many of them—he had never pictured it as anything like this.

Things were much too altered in seven years. You might have hoped they were not ruined; but at least they were altered.

He thought he had appreciated the full force of it that afternoon. He had been wrong. He was only beginning to appreciate it now. Major Sir Donald Holden, late (theoretically) of the Fourth Glebeshires, seemed to have gone through eternity since the afternoon. What he saw now was not the white house, with its Regency pillars, where Celia might be waiting. What he saw was room 307 at the War Office, and Warrender sitting behind the desk.

"Do you mean," Holden heard himself saying again, "that for over a year I'm supposed to have been dead?"

Warrender did not shrug his shoulders. That would have been too elaborate a gesture. But a twitch of his underlip conveyed the same effect

"Fraid so, old boy," Warrender admitted. Holden stared at him. "But—Celia ... !"

"Good God," Warrender said flatly. "Don't tell me you're married?"

During a silence, while they looked at each other, War-render displayed emphasis by unscrewing the cap of a fountain pen and holding the pen as though he were going to sign something.

"You know as well as I do," said Warrender, "that if anybody gets a job like yours, where we've got to pretend he's still with his regiment and kill him in the line of duty, he's allowed to tell his wife. And we inform his solicitor. The other thing only happens in books and films. We may be a peculiar lot here," his khaki-covered arm indicated the War Office, "but that’s understood."

"I'm not married," said Holden.

"Engaged, then?"

"No. Not even engaged. I never asked her."

"Oh!" murmured Warrender. With an air of finality, with a curt breath of relief, he screwed the cap back on the fountain pen. "That's different. I was afraid I'd been remiss."

"You haven't been remiss. When am I supposed to have died?"

"As far as I remember, you were killed with the Glebes during the attack on ... well, I forget the name of the place; I can look it up in the file in half a tick . . . but it was in April just before the war ended. A year and three months and something today. Didn't Kappelman ever tell you?"

"No."

"Damn careless of him. You were supposed to have got a decoration. It was in all the newspapers. Quite a to-do." "Thanks."

"Look here," Warrender began abruptly, and checked himself. Warrender rose to his feet: very lean, very tired looking, hardly half a dozen years older than Holden himself. He stood with his knuckles pressed against the top of the desk, supporting his weight.

"When Jerry started cracking up," he added, "it was the signal for the big boys to hare for cover. Von Steuben bolted to Italy; we had to get Steuben; and you were the man to get him. But they had an intelligence service too. So you had to 'die,' like several other people, to give you a better chance. Well, you got Steuben. The old man's very pleased about that. Look here: you wouldn't really like a decoration of some kind, would you?"

"Great Scott, no!"

Warrender's tone grew bitter.

"It doesn't matter now," he said, and nodded toward the windows overlooking Whitehall. "The war's been over for a year and three months. You're out of the army; out of MI 5; out of everything. But can't you get it through your head that there was a time, not very long ago, when it did matter a devil of a lot?"

Holden shook his head.

"I wasn't complaining," he answered, with his eyes fixed on his companion. "I was only ... trying to get used to it"

"You'll get used to it," said Warrender. He broke off. "Look here, what are you staring at?"

"You," said Holden. "Your hair's gray. I never noticed it until this minute."

Both of them were silent for a moment, while the noise of traffic rose up from Whitehall. Warrender instinctively put up a bony hand to his hair; his mouth seemed twisted.

"Neither did I," said Warrender, "until the war was over."

"Well, good-by," Holden said awkwardly. He stretched out his hand, and the other took it

"Good-by, old son. All the best. Ring me up one day, and we'll—er—have lunch or something."

"Thanks. I will."

Remembering not to salute, since he was now in civilian clothes, Holden turned toward the door. He had his hand on the knob when Warrender, hesitating, abruptly spoke in a different voice.

"I say. Don."

"Yes?"

"Damn it all," exploded Warrender, "I'm not your superior officer any longer. Can't you tell an old pal anything?" "There isn't anything to tell."

"The hell there isn't Come back here. Sit down. Have a cigarette."

Holden slowly returned, with an inner breath of relief he would never have allowed even Warrender to hear. He sank down in a bartered chair beside Warrender's desk. Warrender, glowering, pushed forward a cigarette box as he himself sat down; the smoke of two cigarettes rose in heavy, office-stagnant air.

"Your hair's not gray," Warrender said accusingly. "You're perfectly fit, except maybe your nerves. You've got a brain like . . . like . . . well, I've often envied you. What's more, wait a minute!" Again Warrender broke off, his eyes narrowing. "By George, I've got so much on my mind"—his cigarette indicated the filing-cabinets—"I forgot that tool Two years ago! Or thereabouts! Didn't you come into a title or something?"

"Yes. Baronetcy."

Warrender whistled.

"Any money attached to it?"

"Quite a lot, I believe. Which reminds me," said Holden blowing out smoke, "that I'm supposed to be dead. I suppose somebody else has got it now."

"How many times have I got to tell you," groaned War-render, in a sort of official agony, "that this idea you've got —about the War Office not telling solicitors, when an Intelligence bloke is supposed to be dead—only happens in plays and films? You're all right. Your solicitor knows."

"Ah!" said Holden.

"Then that’s off your mind," Warrender said soothingly. He eyed Holden with refreshed interest. "So you're Sir Donald now, eh? Congratulations. How does it feel?"

"Oh, I don't know. It's all right"

Warrender stared at him.

"My dear chap, you're crackers," he said with real concern. "This last job in Italy has turned your brain. Why aren't you dancing the fandango? Eh? Why aren't—" He paused. "Is it this Celia?"

"Yes."

"What's her other name?" "Devereux. Celia Devereux."

By twisting sideways at Warrender's desk, Holden could see the little desk calendar with the staring red figure 10. Wednesday, July tenth. It was a reminder so sharp pointed that for a moment he closed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he got to his feet and went to one window, where he stood staring down.

Despite the comparative coolness of the office, heat danced in shimmers down stolid Whitehall. After the rainiest June in a quarter of a century, July had come in with a blaze of sun which heated the blood and dazzled the eye. A red bus rumbled past, its new paint glaring after wartime shabbiness. Sandbags, barbed wire in Whitehall, had all been swept away as traffic thickened and thundered. Seven years.

Exactly seven years ago yesterday—the ninth of July—Margot Devereux, Celia's sister, had been married to Tborley Marsh in the little church of Caswall St. Giles. All Holden's thoughts and emotions centered round that wedding, as a kind of symbol.

It had been, he could not help remembering, another such hot day as this. The thick grass blazing in that remote corner of Wiltshire; the shining water round Caswall Moat House; the cool little cave of the church, in whose dimness white and blue and lavender dresses mingled with the colors of flowers.

The rustling, the occasional cough, all came from the pews of spectators behind his back. As Thorley's best man, he stood a few paces behind Thorley and to the right: with Celia, as maid of honor (how well he could remember the light of painted windows through the transparent brim of her large hat!) standing over on the other side of Margot.

Who was it who had said that churches were like "the treasure-caves of pirates?" Confound these literary associations, which always kept twining into his mind. Yet the place had a cavelike smell and atmosphere, too, with its glimmer of stained glass and brass candlesticks. And . . .

He couldn't see Thorley Marsh's face: only Thorley's broad, thick back, straight in black broadcloth, radiating good nature like that rising young stockbroker's whole personality. Yet Thorley was desperately nervous. And Holden could see, past the gauzy white of the veil, a part of Margot’ s profile— the healthy, hearty, laughing Margot, acknowledged as the beauty of the family, to whom Celia's delicacy formed a marked contrast—with her head a little lowered, and color under her eyes.

How fond he was of both Margot and Thorley! How he knew, in his bones and soul, that this was going to be the happiest of marriages!

"I, Margot, take thee, Thorley," the husky contralto voice could barely be heard, "to my wedded husband." It was in little gasps, after the clergyman's urban utterance. "To have and to hold from this day forward. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness, and in health . . ."

A wave of emotion, as palpable as the scent of flowers, flowed out from the little group of spectators in the pews. Everything was emotion, catching at the throat. He had not dared to look at Celia.

How afraid he had been, with that disquiet which always haunts the best man, that he was going to drop the ring! Or that Thorley would drop it when he handed it over. And that they would both have to scramble all over the floor for it, in front of all those people! Then the shock of astonishment at the ease with which it could be managed, when Mr. Reid in his white surplice bent forward and in a ventriloquial sort of voice murmured: "Place the ring on the book, please."

So neither of them could fumble it He and Thorley had looked at each other in surprise, as though this were a special new bit of business ingeniously devised by the church for their benefit

When it was all over, after what seemed an interminable amount of kneeling on hassocks—yes, that had been the high point of emotion—everybody ran forward, in a whirl of colors, and began kissing everybody else. He remembered the grandmother, Mammy Two (eighty years old, her face so whitened with age that it looked powdered) sniffing, with her handkerchief at her pale-blue eyes. He remembered Obey, in a funny hat—Obey, who had nursed both Celia and Margot—hovering in the background. And Sir Danvers Locke, who had given the bride away. And old Dr. Shepton looking on dubiously through his pince-nez. And little Doris Locke, aged twelve, one of the flower girls, for some reason suddenly bursting into tears and refusing even to attend the reception afterward.

As for Celia .. .

It was at this point that Frank Warrender's patient, common-sense voice roused him out of a dream. "Well, old son?"

"Sorry," said Holden. He swung around from the window, smiling, and crushed out his cigarette on the edge of the sill. Warrender, with concern, watched that lean figure against the light from the window: the thin, intellectual face, brown from an Italian sun, with its narrow line of moustache and inscrutable eyes.

"I was thinking," Holden continued, "about Margot’s wedding to a friend of mine named Thorley Marsh. Seven years ago, just before the war broke out"

Warrender's eyebrows went up. "Margot?"

"Celia's elder sister. Margot was twenty-eight; Celia maybe twenty-one. There were only three of the family left: Celia, and Margot, and the old grandmother they called Mammy Two." Holden laughed, not loudly. "Weddings, in retrospect, are always supposed to be funny. I wonder why."

"God knows, old boy. But..."

"I suppose," Holden went on thoughtfully, "because anything that involves strong emotion is afterward considered funny, from matrimony to having high explosives dropped on you. But in weddings there's a sort of (what's the word I want?) a sort of kindliness mixed up with the emotion, and ifs always remembered with a shout of laughter. 'Do you remember when you—?' And so on."

He was silent for a moment, opening and shutting his hands.

"Margot is beautiful," he added suddenly, as though War-render had doubted it "I never saw her so beautiful as then: all colored up, so to speak. Rather tall for a woman; chestnut-colored hair under the white veil; brown eyes set wide apart; dimples when she laughed, which was often. And likeable. The sort of girl who's captain of the hockey team at her school: you know? But Celia—my God, Celia!"

"Look here, Don. Why are you harping so much on this wedding?"

"Because it's the keynote of everything. It went to my head with a romantic bang. And I lost my chance with Celia."

"How do you mean, you lost your chance with Celia?"

Again Holden was silent for a moment.

"I met Celia in the evening," he answered. "Alone. In the path, under the trees, beside that same little church. I . . ."

And again there returned, poignant in vividness, every aspect of that day: every tinge of the sky, every fragrance of grass. The wedding reception at Caswall Moat House—with the sun making a hot cuirass of black broadcloth and starched shirt, and the dun-colored building mirrored in burning water. There had been a Devereux at Caswall ever since it had been known as Caswall Abbey, and one William Devereux bought it from the eighth Henry.

He remembered the tables set out in the great hall, which had been remodeled in the eighteenth century. The toasts, the reading of telegrams, the haste and fuss in one throb of excitement. Then, afterward, the departure of bride and groom, wearing soberer clothes, in Thorley's car... .

All over.

"Just as it was getting toward twilight," said Holden, "I went for a walk in the fields. I didn't expect to meet anybody: I didn't want to meet anybody. Emotion, you seel I went toward the church, which is between Caswall Moat House and Caswall village. There's a little back gate, and a little path that goes past the side of the church between it and the churchyard, with beech trees arching over it. And there I met Celia.

"I was tired. I was—a little crazy, I think. Anyway, for a second we just stood there looking at each other, maybe twenty feet apart Then I walked straight up to her and said . . ."

"Go on," prompted Warrender, glowering down at the desk.

"I said to Celia, 'I'm in love with you, and I’ll always be in love with you, but I haven't got anything to offer you.' She cried out, 'I don't carel I don't care!' And I said, 'Let's never speak of it again, shall we?' She looked at me as though I'd hit her, and said, 'All right, if you insist' And I hurried away from there as though the devil were after me."

Warrender sat up straight, crushing out his cigarette in an ash tray.

"You blithering ass!" he almost shouted.

Ten seconds in time! Holden was reflecting. Ten seconds in time, that conversation with Celia, and the repressed emotion of months pouring out of it. The green twilight of the trees, damp and fragrant Celia with her hands pressed together, slender and gray-eyed; with brown hair like Margot, but otherwise utterly unlike her vivacious sister. Ten seconds —and then everything torn away. He became aware that Warrender was cursing him very comprehensively.

"You blithering ass!" Warrender ended, on a note of mania.

"Yes," Holden assented calmly. "I think so now. And yet," he shook his head, staring at the desk as Warrender did, and yet you know, I'm not altogether sure I wasn't right"

"Pfaa!" said Warrender.

"Think for a minute, Frank. In 1939 the Devereuxs had Caswall with umpteen-hundred acres. They had a big house here in town, out Regent's Park way. And money. Plenty of money." He reflected. "I don't know how well off they are now. Rather better off, I should think; because Thorley was an up-and-coming man in the city, and I understand he's made a good thing out of the war.—In honest business, of course!" he added hastily, as he saw Warrender’s eyebrows draw together.

"Oh, ah? Maybe, I'm cynical. Well?"

"And, in 1939, what was I? A languages master at Lupton, with three hundred a year and my keep. Fine old public school, yes. Cosseted life, nothing to worry about But a wife? I think not"

"But now you're Sir Donald Holden, with a bucketful of cash!"

"Yes." Holden's tone was bitter. "And not very glad to have two brothers, far better men than I'll ever be, die in action so that I could come into the title. Anyway, about Celia . . ." "Well?"

"I'm older now. I suppose, on the whole, I did make an ass of myself. But if s no good debating that I've lost her, Frank, and serves me damn well right"

Warrender jumped to his feet

"Don't talk such blithering rubbish! What do you mean, you've lost her? Is she married?"

"I don't know. Very probably, yes."

"These other people: are they—still about?"

"Still about, I believe. Except Mammy Two; she died in the winter of '41. But the rest are well, so far as I know. And happy."

"When was the last time you saw Celia?" "Three years ago." "Or wrote to her?" Holden looked at him.

"As you yourself pointed out, Frank," he replied carefully, "from the time Jerry started cracking up you had a number of jobs for me. I was in Germany in '44. In '45 you sent me straight to Italy after Steuben. And, in case it's escaped your memory, for the past fifteen months—fifteen months, mind! —I've been supposed to be dead."

"Hang it aw, I've apologized) It was damn careless of Kappelman not to . . ."

"Never mind the official side, Frank. Let's face it."

Perhaps it was the blazing sun at the window that made Holden's scalp feel thick and hot. He moved away from the window, his thin brown face—reserved, moody, dogged—as unfathomable as the eyes. He stood knocking his knuckles, over and over, restlessly, on Warrender’ s desk.

"When we're in the services," he said, "we get the mistaken idea that people and things at home always stay the same. But they don't stay the same. They can't be expected to. If s an odd thing, too. Last night, my first night in London, I went to see a play ..."

"A play!" scoffed Warrender.

"No; but wait a minute. It was about a man who returned after they supposed he was dead. He raised merry blazes, and cut up all kinds of a row, because his wife wasn't still cherishing him with a grand passion.

"But how could she be expected to? Changes, new faces, the passage of years—This grand passion is a notion out of the Roman de la Rose; it died with the Middle Ages, if it ever existed. When one man's gone, a woman eventually finds she can be just as comfortable with another, and that’s —well, it’s only sensible. As for Celia, after the thundering fool I made of myself all that time ago . .."

He paused for a moment, and then added:

"Last night, of course, I didn't know I was supposed to be dead. But I did know there'd been a severance, a blind gap of years. Not a word on either side. I got up and crept out of that theater like a ghost. And now I've had it" He started to laugh. "By George, I've had it!"

"Nonsense!" observed Warrender. "Are you still—er— keen about the girl?"

Holden nearly exploded.

"Am I still. . . !"

"All right," Warrender said coolly. "Where is she? Is she still living with Margot and this What's-his-name, or where is she?"

"When I last heard of her, she was still with Margot and Thorley."

"Well, we'll assume she's stall there. And where are they now? In town, or at Caswall?"

"They're in town," answered Holden. "The first thing I picked up in the lounge of my hotel last night, when I got back from that infernal play, was a copy of the Tatter. There was a photograph of Thorley, looking as sleek as his own Rolls Royce, stepping out in front of the Gloucester Gatehouse."

"Good!" Warrender nodded briskly. He pointed to the battery of telephones on his desk. "There's the phone. Ring her up."

There was a long silence.

"Frank, I can't do it."

"Why not?"

"How many times must I remind you," inquired Holden, "that I'm supposed to be dead? D-e-a-d, dead. Celia isn't a strapping, uninhibited girl like Margot. She's—excitable. Mammy Two used to say ..."

"Say what?"

"Never mind. The point is, suppose Celia answers the phone? She's probably married and not there anyway," Holden added, a little wildly and irrationally, "but suppose she answers the phone?"

"All right," said Warrender. "This Thorley bloke, I presume, has got an office in the city? Good! Ring him there, and explain the situation. Now look here, Don!" Warrender glared at him, the gray hair over the worn face. "This thing is getting you down. You're already thinking of yourself as a bloody outcast and Enoch Arden. And if s got to stop. If you don't ring, I will." "No! Frank! Wait a minute!"

But Warrender had already reached for the telephone directory.

CHAPTER II

And now, in the evening, with the last faint light beyond the trees of Regent's Park, and on the other side of the street—as he passed St. Katharine's Precinct—the tall Regency houses looming up whitish in gloom, Donald Holden still could not feel any less apprehensive, or consider that anything had been settled.

For a time he stood gripping one of the iron bars of the railing round St. Katharine's. Then he moved forward, his heart beating heavily.

A little paved drive, shut off from the main road by trees and a wickerwork fence which had replaced the old iron railings, curved in a crescent past these houses. The house where Celia probably was, and where Margot and Thorley certainly were, was Number 1: the house nearest him at the corner.

Massive, solid as ever! Towering up in smooth white stone, its two storeys above the ground floor buttressed by fluted Corinthian columns set massively into the facade, and supporting a shallow roof peak on which were a few battered statues. Any change here?

Yes. Though even in the dusk its lightless windows shone, new glass clean polished, across one edge of the facade ran a tiny zigzag crack. One of the roof statues stood a little askew against the darkening sky. Regents Park had got it rather badly in the blitz, but he couldn't remember seeing that crack before. It was probably . . .

Well? Go on!

It was certain, as certain as anything could be in this world, that the whole family now knew he was alive. Yet Frank Warrender's telephone call to Thorley's office in the city couldn't have been called an unmitigated success. Again Holden pictured Warrender, with that portentous and stuffed air Frank always assumed at the telephone, dictatorfly attacking the staff. The information that Colonel Warrender, of the War Office, wished to speak to Mr. Thorley Marsh on a matter of vital importance, had brought first a scurry of voices and then the ultrarefined tones of a male secretary, obviously perturbed.

"I'm sorry, sir," the secretary replied. "Mr. Marsh is not at the office." (Holden's heart sank.) "He phoned that he would be at home all day. You could reach him there, if the matter is urgent. Is there anything I can do?"

Warrender cleared his throat

"I believe," he said, tapping his fountain pen on the desk to emphasize each word, "I believe Mr. Marsh has a sister-in-law named Miss Celia Devereux." Whereupon, officialdom being what it is, he could not help rapping out: "Have you any data on Miss Devereux?"

"Data, sir?"

"Precisely."

So great has become our terror of regulations in this free age that the secretary was clearly confusing the War Office with the Home Office, perhaps even with Scotland Yard, and wondering who was in trouble.

"During the war, sir, Miss Devereux was parliamentary secretary to Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore. The M.P., you know. I—I don't think she is employed at present If you could give me a little more information as to the sort of—er— data you want?"

"I mean," said Warrender, in a startlingly more human tone, "is she married?"

The secretary's voice seemed to jump. Holden, who was bending forward to catch each word out of the telephone, gripped the edge of the desk.

"Married, sir? Not to my knowledge."

"Ah!" observed Warrender. "Or engaged?"

The voice hedged. "I believe, sir, there has been some talk of an engagement to Mr. Hurst-Gore. But whether anything has been officially announced. . . ."

"Thank you," said Warrender, and hung up. His official face relaxed.

"The only thing for you to do, old boy," Warrender added, "is to send a long telegram to this Thorley What's-it, at his home address. Even if it falls into the wrong hands, it’ll break things gently. You hang about until the telegram's certain to have been delivered, and then just go out and see the girl. And . . . well, you know. Good luck."

Now there was an end of hanging about.

Over the Park, over Number 1 Gloucester Gate, warm dusk deepened. Distantly a taxi honked; otherwise it was so still that you might have been at Caswall in the country. Holden heard his own footsteps ring on asphalt as he walked into the little crescent of the drive. A short distance, only a short distance from the flight of stone steps leading up to the front door, he stopped again.

Perhaps the unlighted windows daunted him, the sense that nobody was there. But that couldn't be. Perhaps the front door would be opened by fat Obey, the old nurse. Perhaps it would be opened by Celia herself.

"Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore. M.P."

At the right-hand side of the house, a little stone-flagged path, enclosed by a rose trellis on the other side, led to a ack garden surrounded by a high brick wall. Holden, hesitating, made for that path. He told himself (at least, on the surface of his mind) that it was past dinnertime; that they would probably all be in the drawing room; and that the drawing room was at the back of the house, up one floor from the ground with its little iron balcony and staircase. So, of course, it would be best to go straight there.

And, as he walked down that path, a rush of memories returned bittersweet. In that back garden he had often had tea with Celia. He could see Margot there, too; in a deck chair, with a fashion magazine or else (her only kind of reading matter) a thriller or a book of trials. In that same garden, during the blitz days which now seemed so far off as to be prewar, Mammy Two—wrinkled-white of face, insatiably curious, her shawl round her shoulders—had stood night after night, watching the raiders under a sky white with gunfire.

Since their part of Wiltshire was a safe area, Thorley had thought it only prudent to take Margot to Caswall during the blitz. But Mammy Two refused to go.

"My dear child," Holden could hear her husky indomitable voice saying, in an utterly bewildered tone, "it's so silly of them to think they can browbeat us with this nonsense." (Bam went a battery of three-point-nines in Regent's Park; and the glass lusters of the chandelier jumped and clanked and tingled.) "It makes me really angry. That's why I'm here. I hate London otherwise, y'know."

And again:

"Die?" said Mammy Two. "Well, my dear child, I only hope when my time comes they'll have finished the new vault in Caswall churchyard. The old one is so crowded if s a sin and a shame." Her old eyes, pale blue in a white face, hardened and grew apprehensive. "But I don't want to die yet I've got to look out for—things."

"Things?"

"There's a funny streak in our family, /know. One of my granddaughters is all right, but I've been worried about the other ever since she was a little child. No, I don't want to be taken yet"

And so, in the bitter winter of '41, when high explosives showered down amid drifting snowflakes, she stayed too long in that garden watching the searchlights, and she died of pneumonia within a week. Celia, they said, had cried for days. Celia wouldn't leave town either.

Celia....

Pushing away these memories, which brought a lump into his throat in spite of himself, Holden hurried past scratching tendrils of rose trees into the garden. Again the utter stillness oppressed him. The cropped lawn, the sundial, the plum trees against the east wall, swam in a thin whitish dusk which made outlines just visible.

And there were no lights at the back of the house, either.

But this wasn't possible! There must be somebody at home! Besides, the full-length windows of the drawing room were standing wide open.

Holden stared at the back of the house. Across it, about fifteen feet above the ground, ran a narrow balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade; a flight of iron stairs led down into the garden. On the left were the tall door-windows of the drawing room; on the right, if he remembered correctly, a similar pair of door-windows led to the dining room. No sign of life anywhere. The ground-floor windows, even, were shuttered; the back door was closed.

Holden, now so puzzled that his self-assurance was returning, ran quickly up the iron stairs. It was as though, in the vividness of those memories, he had never been away. The balcony still rattled underfoot, just as it used to do. Fishing out his pocket lighter, he walked to the nearer of the open drawing-room windows. He put his head inside, and snapped on the flame of the lighter.

"Hullol" he called. "Is anybody at home? I. .."

Inside the room, a woman screamed.

That scream went piercing up with such suddenness, out of the dim drawing room, that in the shock of it the lighter slipped through Holden's fingers and clattered on the polished hardwood floor. At the same time the realization flooded his wits—ass! fool! Imbecile! that he had done precisely the thing he had been trying so hard to avoid.

It was the same drawing room, very large and lofty, its walls painted dark green, the arabesque gold of the Venetian mirror above a white marble mantelpiece, the white slip covers on the furniture showing ghostly against dusk. Not a single glass prism seemed missing from its chandelier. And the room was very much occupied.

Holden could make out the shadowy figure of Thorley Marsh, and of a girl who—thank God!—certainly wasn't either Celia or Margot. They appeared to have been standing rather close together, but they had jumped apart Holden's brain seemed to ring with the intensity of that moment of silence.

"I'm Don Holden, Thorley! I'm alive! I . . . Didn't you get my telegram?"

Thorley's voice, usually full throated, quavered out of gloom.

"Who—?"

"I tell you, Thorley, I'm Don Holden! It was all a mistake about my being lolled! Or at least . . . Didn't you get my telegram?"

"Tele . . ." began Thorley, and stopped. His hand moved toward the side pocket of his coat. Then, clearing his throat, he enunciated very slowly and clearly, but still shakily: 'Telegram."

"Ifs true, Thorley!" breathed the girl. (Who was she? Holden couldn't distinguish her face. She had a young, soft voice.) "You—you did get a telegram!" She gulped. "It got here just as I did. We—we landed on the doorstep together. But you didn't open it. You put it in your pocket."

"Don!" muttered Thorley.

And he walked forward hesitantly, at his slow moving and heavy tread on the hardwood floor.

Holden bent over and picked up the fallen lighter. He could have kicked himself. In his pleasure at seeing Thorley, in the radiance of good nature and kindliness which always surrounded Thorley, he had not quite realized the shock this would be. But in that case (swift-prompting thought) what about Celia? Thorley hadn't opened the telegram! Then Celia didn't know either.

Thorley, wearing a dark suit, had been only a blur of black and white until he emerged into the after glow from the windows. He stood there for a moment, staring. He had changed very little. He had perhaps put on weight, making the bulky body thicker, and gained in the face as well: a handsome face, though the tendency to weight made his fine features seem a little too small. There were tiny horizontal lines across his forehead. But the black hair, shining and plastered down to a nicety, showed no tinge of gray. Then Thorley woke up.

"My dear old boy!" he cried. It was as though icicles tinkled and fell. He threw an arm across Holden's shoulder, and began to wallop him on the back with real affection. He added, hastily and rather incoherently: "Unexpectedness . .. you must forgive . . . under the circumstances . . . things that have been happening—"

(Things that have been happening?]

Anyway," said Thorley, with all the charm and kindliness radiant in his smile, "anyway, my dear fellow, how are you?"

"I'm fine, thanks. Never better. But listen, Thorley! Celia . . ."

"Oh, yes, Celia." A new thought came to Thorley; there was a slight pause. His dark eyes grew evasive. "Celia . . . isn't here just now."

Holden's heart sank. Wasn't he ever to see her, then? Probably she was out with Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore, M.P. Still, maybe it was better like this.

Across the room there was a slight click, and a light went on.

The girl, hovering, had been standing at the far side of a white-covered sofa where there was a little table and a table lamp with a buff-colored shade. Both Thorley and Holden swung round as she pressed the button of the lamp. Standing just over that lamp, with the light from its open top shining up strongly across her face, the girl tried to keep a cool and assured air.

She was perhaps nineteen, though with a hair style and make-up designed for one considerably older, and she was not very tall. That core of light, brilliant in the midst of green-painted walls, showed .her dark-blue frock trimmed with white, and the blonde hair drawn above her ears, under a white hat A stranger? Apparently. Yet to Holden that pretty face, with its rather angry blue eyes and spoiled mouth, suggested ...

Yes! It suggested the background of a church, never very far from his thoughts, and a little flower girl, aged twelve, who . . .

"You're Sir Danvers Locke's daughter," he said flatly. "You're little Doris Locke!"

The girl stiffened. That word "little" had obviously annoyed her. She stood turning her head slowly from one side to the other, either in keeping her eyes away from the light or in deliberately posing.

"How terribly clever of you to remember me," she murmured. Then, in a different voice, she burst out: "I think it was an awfully mean trick of you to pop up like that!"

"It was unpardonable, Miss Locke. I deeply apologize."

His formal courtesy and grave bearing, for some reason, made her flush.

"Oh, that’s all right. It--it doesn't matter." She took up gloves and a handbag from the table. "Anyway, I'm afraid I must be pushing off now."

"You're not going?" Thorley cried incredulously.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" said Doris. "I promised to meet Ronnie Merrick at the Cafe Royal, and then we're going on somewhere to dance." Doris looked at Holden. "Ronnie's nice. Probably I shall marry him, because my father wants me to, and they say he's going to be a great painter one day: I mean Ronnie, of course, not my father. But he's so young."

"He's a year older than you," said Thorley.

"I always say," observed Doris, elaborately turning her eyes away, "that a person is as old as they feel." Again her tone changed. "Go on, Mr. Holden! Say 'as old as they feel' is shocking grammar. You were always like that. Go on! Say it!"

Holden laughed.

"It's bad grammar, Miss Locke. I don't know about the 'shocking’ part."

But the girl was regarding him strangely. Something different, something straightforward and likable, looked out of the blue eyes.

"You—you were the one," she added suddenly, "who was so keen about Celia. And thought you were keeping your secret so well, only everybody knew it. And she was absolutely scatty about you. And now, things being what they are ... oh, God!" said Doris, her fingers tightening round her handbag. "I must go. Excuse me."

And, startlingly, she almost ran for the door.

"Wait!" cried Thorley, a bulky figure coming to life. "Let me send you in the car! Let me . . ."

But the door had closed. They heard a quick, agitated rapping of high-heeled shoes fading away down the hall; then the hollow slam of the front door, which made one or two prisms tingle in the chandelier.

('Things being what they are," Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore, M.P.?)

Thorley, solid and stolid looking, took half a dozen indecisive paces toward the door. Then he swung round, the lamp light sleek on his black hair, and stood jingling coins deep in his pockets. He began talking in a very hurried way.

"Er—that was Doris Locke," he explained rapidly. "Daughter of old Danvers Locke. He's got a big place down in the country near Caswall. Fellow collects masks; all sorts of masks; even got a metal one worn by a German executioner hundreds of years ago; crazy hobby. But filthy with money— absolutely filthy—and, of course, in with all the right people in the business world. He ..."

"Thorley! Oi!"

Thorley broke off. "What did you say, old man?"

"I know all that," Holden said gently. "I'm acquainted with Locke too, you know."

"Yes. Of course. So you are." Thorley passed a hand across his forehead. "It's damn difficult," he complained. "Putting things back in their places again."

"Yes. I've found that out."

"Then you weren't killed in that famous attack? And didn't get a DSO?" "I'm afraid not."

"You've rather let me down, young fellow," said Thorley, with the ghost of his jovial laugh. "I've been bragging about you all over the place." He frowned. "But look here: what did happen to you? Were you a prisoner of war or something? Even so, why did you stop writing? And why turn up like this when the war's been over for so long?"

"I was in Intelligence, Thorley."

"Intelligence?"

'Yes. Certain things had to be done, and certain other things printed in the newspapers. ‘I’ll explain later. The point is . . ."

"I suppose," Thorley said gloomily, "it was all eyewash, too, about your getting that baronetcy. Ah, well. Doesn't matter now. I remember thinking, though, it was a bit of bad luck: getting knocked off in the field only a couple of months after you'd come into a pot of cash, and could arrange your life in any way you liked. Poor old Celia . . ."

"For Christ's sake, stop talking about it/"

Thorley, startled and hurt, opened his eyes wide. For a moment he looked like an overgrown child.

"I beg your pardon," said Holden, instantly getting a grip on himself. "I seem always, from the best of motives, to be doing or saying the wrong thing. No offense?"

"Lord, no! Of course not!"

"As you say, Thorley, that doesn't matter now. My story can wait. The point is, how are things with you?"

For a moment Thorley did not reply. He wandered over to the large sofa beside which the lamp was burning, and sat down. He put his hands on his knees, and contemplated the floor. His face, with the handsome features rather too small for it, was as blank as the dark eyes. The house seemed very still, uncannily still. Not a breath of wind stirred in from the darkening garden.

Holden laughed. "As I came in here tonight," he remarked, suddenly conscious that he was trying to make light conversation and wondering why, "as I came in here tonight, I was thinking about Mammy Two."

"Oh?" Thorley glanced quickly sideways. "Why?"

"Well," smiled Holden, "have you and Margot got any children yet? I think it was always a source of disappointment to Mammy Two that you didn't at least begin a family. Hang it all, Thorley, how's Margot? And, by the way, where is Margot?"

Thorley's glance rested on him for a moment, and then moved across to the white marble mantelpiece on the other side of the room.

"Margot's dead," he answered.

CHAPTER III

The shock of that announcement, the vague sense that Thorley had really said something else and that he had misheard the word, kept Holden dumb.

No clock ticked in the room. There was an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, in front of the great dim Venetian mirror with its arabesques of tarnished goldwork, but that clock had been silent for many years. Holden's eyes moved over to the mirror, and across to a cabinet of Sevres porcelain against another walL and then back again to Thorley sitting there—his hands flat on his knees, his head again lowered— under the light of the buff-colored lamp.

And now for the first time Holden noticed something else. Thorley's dark suit was a black suit; and his necktie, against the shiny white collar and white shirt, was also black.

"Dead?"

"Yes." Thorley did not look up.

"But that’s impossible!" cried Holden, as though desperately trying to persuade him out of an unreasonable attitude. "Margot never had a day's illness in her life. How . . . when. . . ?"

Thorley cleared his throat.

"At Caswall. More than six months ago. Just before Christmas. We were all down at Caswall for Christmas."

"But—what.. . ?"

"Cerebral hemorrhage."

"Cerebral hemorrhage? What's that?"

"I don't know," Thorley said querulously. "If s something you die of." Holden could see that Thorley was moved, deeply moved, and his voice had thickened; but what sounded in that voice was a kind of irritation. "Confound it, talk to Dr. Shepton! You remember old Dr. Shepton? He attended her. I did all I could." He paused. "God knows I did."

"I'm sorry, Thorley." Holden also spoke after a pause. "I know you don't want to talk about it So I won't say anything more, except that I haven't any words to express how . .. how . . ."

"No, ifs all rightl" For the first time Thorley looked up. He said huskily: "Margot and I were—very happy."

"Yes. I know."

"Very happy," insisted Thorley, his fist clenched on his knee. "But it's all over now, ana I don't see any practical good to be gained by brooding on the matter." After breathing heavily for a few seconds, breathing noisily through small nostrils, he added: "I don't mind talking about it now. Only: don't ask me too much."

"But what was it all about, Thorley? What happened?"

Thorley hesitated.

"It was at Caswall; did I tell you? Two days before Christmas. Margot and Celia and I, and a very fine chap named Derek Hurst-Gore—did you say something?"

"No. Go on."

"Anyway, the four of us drove over in the evening to Widestairs—that's Danvers Locke's house—for dinner and a bit of a party. There was Locke, and his wife, and Doris; and, by the way, an insufferably self-opinionated young ass who thinks he can make a living by slinging paint on canvas. His name's Ronald Merrick. He's got a calf-love for Doris; and, for some reason or other, Locke wants her to marry him."

"Never mind about that, Thorleyl What about Margot?"

Thorley's fist clenched tighter.

"Well, we were a bit late in getting there; because the good old hot-water heater at Caswall, as usual in cold weather, went on strike; and Obey didn't get it repaired until next day. But the party was grand fun. We played games." Again he hesitated. "I didn't notice anything wrong with Margot. She was excited and overhearty, but that usually happened when she got involved in games. You know?"

Holden nodded.

The image in his mind of Margot—brown eyed, with the dimples in her cheeks—grew achingly clear. In his philosophy Margot was one of those simple souls, easily moved to laughter or tears, always blurting out something that shouldn't be blurted out, in connection with whom the idea of death is utterly incongruous.

"Anyway," muttered Thorley, "we left the party very early. Eleven o'clock or thereabouts. We were all stone-cold sober, or near enough, at least. By half-past eleven we'd all turned in, or I thought we had.... Have—have you been to Caswall since the war?"

"No. Not since your wedding. Somebody told me, in the summer after the blitz, it was to be taken over by the military."

Thorley shook his head.

"Oh, no," he said. He did not exactly smile, but a curious expression of complacency, almost of smugness, crept round his jowls; Holden had never seen it there before. "Oh, no. I saw to that. None of my relatives got hoicked into the services, either. You can wangle anything, my boy, if you know your way about.

"But I was telling you. You remember the Long Gallery at Caswall? Margot and I," he moistened his lips, "had the suite of rooms on the floor above that. A bedroom and a sitting room each, with a bathroom between the two bedrooms, all in a line. That's where—that's where we were.

"I didn't sleep very well that night I kept dozing off, and waking up again. About two o'clock in the morning I thought I heard somebody calling, or moaning and groaning, from the direction of Margot's rooms. I got up, and looked in the bathroom. But it was dark. I turned on the light there, and looked in her bedroom; but that was dark too and the bed hadn't been slept in. Then I saw a light under the door to her sitting room.

"I went in there," said Thorley, "and found Margot, still dressed in her evening gown, lying all sprawled on her back across one of those chaise-longue things. She wasn't conscious, but she was sort of moving and raving. She was a funny color, too."

Thorley paused, staring at the floor.

"It scared me," he confessed. "I didn't want to wake anybody else up, so I nipped downstairs and phoned the doctor. Dr. Shepton was there in fifteen minutes. By that time Margot was partly conscious, but with throat constriction; and there was rigidity, you know; and she didn't seem to know much what was going on.

"The doctor said it was brought on by nervous excitement, and probably not serious. We got her to bed. The doctor gave her a sedative, and said he'd be back in the morning. I sat and held her hand all night

"But Margot didn't get better: she was worse. At half-past eight the doctor came back; I nipped down again and let him in. Poor old Shepton was looking pretty grim. He said he was afraid of cerebral hemorrhage: breaking of blood vessels in the brain, I think it is. It was very cold. Still nobody in tile house was awake yet At nine o'clock, as the sun was coming up, she just. . . died."

There was a long silence.

Thorley's last word fell piteously, with a small and plaintive simplicity. He looked very hard at his companion, as though longing to add something else; but Thorley decided against it Lifting his thick shoulders, he rose to his feet and went to one of the windows, where he stood staring out into the garden.

"Shepton," he added, "wrote out the death certificate." "Oh?"

"Never saw one of 'em before," remarked Thorley, jingling coins in his pocket "It's a thing like a gigantic check, with a counterfoil that the doctor keeps when he tears the certificate out and gives it to you. You're supposed to post it on to the registrar, but I forgot to."

"I see," said Holden, who didn't see in the least

Had he experienced, ever since he first entered this house tonight, a vague feeling of disquiet? A subconscious sense that something was wrong? Nonsense! Yet there it was: an instinct of black waters swirling, of dangerous images just out of view, and—what was worst and most irrational—the feeling that Celia was involved in it

"I see," he repeated. "And is that all you have to tell me?"

"Yes. Except that poor Margot was buried in the new family vault in Caswall churchyard. It was two days after Christmas. We . . ."

Some strange note in Holden's voice, faintly jarring, had caught Thorley's attention in the midst of his absorption. Thorley stopped jingling coins in his pocket and turned around from the window.

"What exactly do you mean, is that all I have to tell you?"

Holden made a despairing gesture. "Thorley, I don't know! It's only ... I never had any idea Margot's health was as bad as that!"

"She wasn't in bad health. She was in good health. The thing might have happened to anybody. Shepton said so."

"Death from overexcitement at a party?"

"Look here, Don. Have you any reason to doubt Dr. Shepton's ability, or his good faith?"

"No, no, of course not! It's only that. . . that. . ."

"You're shocked, old chap," said Thorley in a commiserating voice. "Of course you are. So were all of us, at first. It was sudden. It was tragic. It made us remember that," there was almost a blink of tears in his eyes, "that in the midst of life we are in death, and all that sort of business."

Thorley shifted, as though hesitating to approach some fact that must be approached.

"And there's another thing, Don," he went on, "I've arranged to go down to Caswall tomorrow. Only for a short visit, of course. This will be the first time any of us has been there since it happened. As a matter of fact, my boy, I'm thinking of selling the place."

Holden stared at him.

"Selling Caswall? When you've got the money to keep it up?"

"Why not?" Thorley demanded.

"There are four hundred years of reasons why not."

"That's just the point," said Thorley in a different voice. "The place is unhealthy. It's unhealthy with age. All those portraits in the Long Gallery—they're unhealthy." He did not explain the reason for this last extraordinary statement "Besides, it can't be staffed properly. And we'll never get as good a price for the place as we'll get now."

"How does Celia feel about it?"

Thorley ignored this.

"So, as I say," he persisted, "Celia and I are going down to Caswall tomorrow." He took a deep breath. "Under any other circumstances, my dear fellow, I'd be only too delighted to invite you to go along with us . . ."

There was a long silence.

"Under any other circumstances?"

"Yes."

"Then I gather," Holden said with great politeness, "I am not invited to Caswall."

"Don, for heaven's sake don't misunderstand!"

"What is there to misunderstand? But if Celia's going with you ..."

"Don, that's Just it!" Thorley paused. "The fact is, I'd rather you didn't meet Celia." "Oh? Why not?"

"Not just at the moment, anyway. Afterward, maybe—"

"Thorley," said Holden, putting his hands in his pockets, "I'm quite aware that for the past few minutes, in your highly diplomatic way, you've been trying to tell me something. What are you trying to tell me? Why don't you want me to meet Celia?"

"If s nothing, really. If s only . . ."

"Answer me! Why don't you want me to meet Celia?"

"Well, if you must know," Thorley replied calmly, "we're a little disturbed about the balance of her mind."

Now the silence stretched out unendurably.

Outside the circle of light thrown by the table lamp, the radiance across white-covered sofa and edges of rugs on a polished floor, the rest of the big drawing room had retreated into darkness. The mirror brought back from Italy by a seventeenth-century Devereux, the Sevres porcelain cabinet from the palace of Versailles, the little First Empire settee against another wall, had all faded into shadows. Up over the garden outside, seen through long door-windows, were a few bright stars and the hint of a rising moon.

Donald Holden turned away and walked slowly round the room, inspecting each article without seeing it. His footsteps sounded with great distinctness. Thorley watched him. Still without speaking, Holden circled around until he faced Thorley from beside the lamp.

"Are you trying to tell me," he said, "that Celia is insane?"

"No, no, no!" scoffed Thorley, with cheery, false heartiness. "Not as serious as that, of course. Nothing, I'm sure, that a good psychiatrist couldn't cure; that is, if she'd only go to one. At least," he hesitated, "I hope it's no more serious than that."

Then Holden did what Thorley perhaps least expected. He started to laugh. Thorley was shocked.

"If you see anything funny in this!" Thorley said reproachfully.

"Yes. I do see something funny in it."

"Oh?"

"In the first place," said Holden, "I don't believe a word of it" The idea of the gentle, gray-eyed Celia as mentally incompetent was so grotesque that he laughed again. "In the second place . . ."

"Well?"

"When you started all these devious cat-footed tactics of approach, I thought you were trying to get rid of me so as to leave a clear field for the excellent Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore."

"I never had any such idea!" cried Thorley, in obviously genuine astonishment "Though, mind you," he added on reflection, "Celia might do worse if—if she were in a state to marry anybody. He kept his seat when the Conservatives went out and he's going to go far. Whereas (if you'll excuse my saying so, old man) you're not much of a catch; now are you?"

"Agreed," said Holden. A cold shock had gone through him at those words, "if she were in a state to marry anybody." The shock cleared his wits; it stung him alert, and made him very steady. "But never mind Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore. Let's get back to this question of Celia's insanity."

Thorley made a fussed gesture.

"Don't say that word! I don't like it!"

"Well, lef s call it her mental disturbance. What form does that disturbance take?"

Thorley let his glance stray away; as though he were trying, without turning around, to look out of the window behind him.

"She's—saying things." "Saying what things?"

"Things that are impossible. And crazy. And—well, pretty horrible," muttered Thorley. Suddenly he looked back at Holden, his face whitish in gloom. "I'm very fond of Celia, Don. More so than you'll ever guess, if you only knew the whole facts of this business. There mustn't be any scandal.

There must never be any scandal. But, if she keeps on talking as she's been talking .. ." "Saying what?"

"Sorry, old chap. I haven't got time to go into it now."

"Then shall I tell you?"

"What’s that?"

"Has she by any chance been saying," asked Holden, "that Margot's death wasn't a natural death?"

The stars, hitherto bright over a dark garden, were paling with the rising moon. Neither Thorley nor Holden moved.

"You see," continued the latter, "even if Celia were completely out of her mind"—Holden could not help a shudder going through him—"why are you so anxious I shouldn't meet her? After all, I'm an old friend. I couldn't hurt her. Is it because you knew very well she's as sane as you are, and she's got at the truth that Margot didn't die a natural death; and you're afraid I'd back her up?"

Holden took a few steps forward: short, shuffling steps.

"Listen, Thorley," he said, gently. "You're quite right I will back her up. And if you're trying any games against Celia, or even thinking of trying any games against Celia"—his hands opened and shut—"then God help you. That’s just a little warning."

Thorley, catching the expression of his eyes, stared back at him. Thorley's next remark sounded almost grotesque.

'You've—you've changed," he complained.

'I’ve changed? What about yourself?"

"Changed?" Thorley was equally surprised. "No, I think not. I'm still doing business at the same old stand. And if it comes to any—er—argument between us, we'll see who wins: the old maestro," he tapped himself on the chest complacently "or you." Then his expression grew strained again. "But I think you ought to know, for old friendship's sake, that you're doing me an injustice."

"Am I? I wish to heaven I could think sol"

"Ifs true, Don." Thorley hesitated. "Do you want to hear the real reason why I don't want you to meet Celia yet? Can you take it?"

"Of course I can take it Well?"

"Weill Celia's practically forgotten you."

It was the one thing which could knock the props out from under him. And it did. Thorley was sympathetic.

"Now let's face it, Don," he said. He came over and put his hand on Holden's arm. "At one time Celia was very much in love with you. You, as I understand it—I've only heard this through Margot—once started to make love to her, and then suddenly said you never wanted the subject mentioned again." "I was a blazing fool!"

"Well," Thorley shrugged his shoulders, "that’ s as it may be. I think you weren't, myself. The point is, you've given her plenty of time to forget it What happens if you turn up now?"

"Why should anything happen?"

"Celia's in a very dangerous mental state. Wait a minute! You don't seem to believe that But you can at least believe Margot’s death was a very great blow to her. She adored Margot You agree?"

He could not help admitting it "Yes. Margot was always a kind of idol."

"And how many times have you seen Celia since the beginning of the war?"

"Only twice, since 1940. The Glebes were sent wherever there was trouble going: Africa. Then, in '43, I was drafted for special training with Intelligence. Languages, you see. And .. ."

"Only twice, since 1940," mocked Thorley, in a sympathetic voice. "Celia isn't well, Don. Mammy Two (do you remember?) always said she'd been worried about her, ever since Celia was a child. I tell you straight, Don: if you turn up from the dead now, and reopen that old emotional business when she's almost forgotten it, I won't be responsible for the consequences. Can't you see that?"

"In a way. Yes."

"Fortunately, as I told you, Celia isn't here this evening. But look at that door to the hall there! What do you think the effect would be, if Celia came back and suddenly saw you here now? If you have any feeling for her, Don—any feeling at all —you can't risk that Now can you?"

Holden pressed his hands to his forehead.

"But... what do you want me to do?"

"Go away," answered Thorley firmly.

"Go away?"

"Go back down those balcony stairs," Thorley pointed, "the way you came. The way you came when Doris Locke and I thought you were a gh——" For some reason Thorley did not seem to like the word "ghost" He stopped. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the windows. "Funny!" be said. "I thought I heard somebody out there just now. But it wasn't. Never mind."

He turned back, his hand on Holden's arm. .

"Go away, Don. After all, the whole thing is your fault. Celia wouldn't thank you for upsetting her by turning up again. You had your chance; and, for whatever reason, you bungled it"

"It was because ..."

"I know; it was because you were only making twopence-halfpenny a year; and I honor you for it. Still, you did rather hit her in the face. She's forgotten you now. Think of the disastrous consequences if . . ."

Again Thorley stopped dead. His hand dropped from Holden's arm. He was staring past Holden's shoulder, staring at the door to the hall, with such an expression that his companion involuntarily swung around.

And the door to the hall opened, and Celia came in.

CHAPTER IV

The door was in the upper right-hand comer of the room as you stood with your back to the windows. It opened inwards; Celia's hand was on the knob, and a dim light burned in the hall behind her. He afterward remembered that she had begun to speak, as though in explanation or warning to anybody who might be there, even while the door was opening.

"I think I left my handbag in here," the well-remembered voice said rapidly. "I'm going for a walk in the park, and . . ."

She saw Holden.

Then—silence.

All three of them stood as though paralyzed. In a sense this was true; Holden could not have spoken to save his life. He felt the light of the table lamp shining on his face, as though it were a physical heat; he felt himself caught there, unable to retreat even into darkness.

There was the flesh-and-blood Celia, after so many days and nights of the imagined one. And utterly unchanged. The broad forehead, the arched brows over gray dreaming eyes, the short straight nose, the lips a little quirked at one comer as though from looking wryly at the world, the smooth brown hair parted now on the left-hand side and drawn behind her ears to fall at the back of the neck, and—thank God!—the clear-glowing skin of health.

If memory plays tricks, we expect them to be poor tricks. In our hearts we, as cursers of hope, never expect a real meeting quite to live up to an imagined one. But for Holden it was the other way around. This was more; it was worse, as a dozen times more poignant. If only he hadn't wrecked it, hadn't hurt Celia, by this sudden . . .

Seconds passed. He would have said that minutes passed while Celia stood motionless, gripping the knob, slender in a white dress, without stockings and with red shoes, against the brown-painted door.

Then Celia spoke.

"They sent you on some kind of special military job," she said. Her voice went into a strange unnatural key; she had to clear her throat several times before she got the voice level. But she made this as a simple statement "They sent you on some kind of special job. That was why you couldn't see me or write to me."

In an immense void he heard himself speaking.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody told me," Celia answered simply. A hundred memories seemed to be passing behind her eyes. "As soon as I saw you, I just knew."

Her face seemed to crumple up; she was going to cry.

"Hello, Don," she said.

"Hello, Celia."

"I—I was going over into the park," said Celia; and suddenly looked away from him, out into the hall. He could see the line of her neck, the soft turn of the cheek, shining against the light there. "Would—would you like to go with me?"

"Of course. Then you didn't believe I was d . . ."

"I believed it," said Celia, as though trying carefully to define her terms. "I believed it. And yet at the same time I—" She broke off. "Oh, hurry, hurry! Please hurry!"

He went toward her, circling round the sofa and walking very carefully, because his knees were shaking. Also, in that unreal void, he had a wild idea that unless he walked carefully he might put his foot straight through the floor. Yet a certain memory whipped back at him.

"You said—into the park, Celia. You mean you weren't out this evening? You've been in the house all the time?" "Yes, of ocourse. Why?"

"Thorley," observed Holden, "you or I are going to have one or two things to talk about But that can wait Until we all go down to Caswall tomorrow."

Thorley, too, was pale. Not once had Celia glanced in his direction.

"Until we go down to Caswall tomorrow?" Thorley repeated.

"Yes. You say you want to sell Caswall. Have you found a purchaser for it?" "No. Not yet. But . . ."

"I'll buy the place," snarled Holden. He became aware that he was shouting. "In the excitement of the moment I forgot to tell you that the report about an inheritance wasn't a part of the joke. It was true."

And he followed Celia out of the room.

Without speaking, in the same void, emotionally blind and helpless, moving like sleepwalkers, these two went toward the front door. They did not speak because they had too much to say. There was no starting point A light in a cut-glass globe, hanging from the lofty ceiling in the hall, shone on the tall full-length portrait of a Regency gentleman with wind-blown hair and a cutaway coat under which was a little brass plate engraved Edward Agnew Devereux, Esq., by Sir H. Raeburn.

Vaguely he noticed that Celia, who was trembling, glanced at this portrait as though she were remembering something.

He wanted to tell her . . .

Yes! He wanted to tell her he had sent a telegram, but that Thorley hadn't opened it Why hadn't Thorley opened it? Telegrams convey a sense of urgency. You open them, as a rule, the instant they are received. If you don't it is because something of overpowering interest distracts your attention at the same time. The telegram had arrived at the same time as small but vigorously grown-up Doris Locke.

Stop! Instead of being the first of a million explanations, this was only leading thoughts into a blind alley.

They were outside the house now, in warm and kindly darkness. They slowly crossed the little curve of the drive, out to the pavement of the main road where the white, clear-glowing street lamps showed a deserted road and trees on the other side.

"We cross here," said Celia.

"Oh?"

"Yes," Celia explained very carefully. 'To the other side. About fifty yards up there's a side entrance into the park. This is where we cross."

Celia's nerves, he was thinking, were magnificent. Flighty, eh? There probably wasn't another woman anywhere who could have received such unexpected news with no more than a change of color or a turn of the eyes. It hadn't affected her at all. He thought so, that is, until—without any warning, when they were partway across the road'—Celia's knees gave way; she would have fallen if he had not caught her.

"Celia!" he cried.

But she only sobbed and clung to him, while he held her very tightly.

The lights of a motorcar, moving rapidly, sprang up from the direction of Regent's Park Crescent and hummed straight toward them: yellow-blazing eyes which swallowed up the road as the car bore down. It is a sober fact that Holden did not even notice this.

He never realized it until the car—with a whush of air at their elbows, and a scream of curses from the driver—swerved violently past them within a foot's clearance. Then he picked Celia up, carried her back to the curb, set her on her feet under a street lamp, and, while she held him just as tightly, he kissed her mouth for a very long time.

Presently Celia spoke.

"Do you know, she said, with her head against his shoulder, still crying, "that's the first time you ever kissed me?"

"In times gone by, Celia, I was twenty-eight years old and the biggest bloody fool in recorded history."

"No, you weren't! You were only ..."

"I was about to point out, anyway, that we have a great deal of lost time to make up for. Shall we continue?"

"No!" said Celia. Her soft body tightened in his arms. She ran her hands over his shoulders, as though to make sure of his reality. She threw her head back and looked up at him: her lips smiling, the imaginative fine-drawn face tear stained, the shining wet gray eyes searching his face—searching it, and searching it again, with intensity—under the white pallor of the street lamp.

"I mean," she added, "not here! Not now! I want to think about you. I want to get used to you."

"I love you, Celia. I always have." "Are we in love?"

Don Holden felt lightheaded with happiness.

"My dear Celia," he began oracularly, "consider indisputable proof in this matter. Did you hear what the driver of that car said when he roared past?"

She looked puzzled. "He—he swore at us."

"Yes. To be exact, he said 'god-damnedest thing I ever saw.' The remark, though inelegantly phrased, contains a deep philosophical truth. Shall we search the story of famous lovers ... of Daphnis and Chloe, of Hero and Leander, of Pyramus and Thisbe, of (to be more prosaic about it) Victoria and Albert... for many instances of two persons standing locked in each other's arms in the middle of a main motor road?"

"I love you when you talk like that," Celia said seriously. "It's not exactly romantic; but it seems to make everything so much more fun. Where have you been, Don? It was rather awful. Where have you been?"

He tried to explain a little of it, and somewhat incoherently.

"You—you got Scharfuhrer von Steuben? That Dachau man who said he'd never be taken alive?"

"He had to be taken alive. They're hanging him this month."

"But—what happened?" (He felt her shudder) "Well, it took some time to run him down. Then there was a dust-up." "Please, Don. What happened?"

"He'd got himself up disguised as a priest. We shot it out in a churchyard about three miles from Rome. I nicked him through the kneecap, and it was so painful he just rolled over and screeched. The funny thing was ..."

"Yes, Don?" she pressed him more tightly.

"Do you remember that time we met, in Caswall churchyard, under the trees, after the wedding? And I made such a bash of things? Weill Once or twice when I saw Steuben's dial, under the broad-brimmed priest’s hat, looking at me around a tombstone over the top of a Luger, I kept thinking that a number of important incidents in my life seemed to be happening in churchyards."

There was a pause, and a sudden odd change in her mood.

"Do you know," cried Celia, suddenly looking up and around as though she had just realized it, "we're standing under a street lamp? And there'll probably be a policeman along at any minute? Lets go across to the park, Don. Please!"

They crossed the road hurriedly. Some fifty yards up, as Celia had said, there was a side entrance. (They did not see the immense dark shadow, apparently too huge to be real, which, as soon as they were gone, seemed to materialize from behind the trees guarding the little crescent of Gloucester Gate, and stretch out after them. No; they did not see it.)

The night fragrance of the park enclosed them. A broad path, of fine-crushed brown gravel, stretched away into dimness through lines of thick-leaved dwarf chestnut trees like the alley of a formal garden. Once into the shadow of the trees, they became aware of moonlight: clear moonlight, of soap-bubble luminousness, making images even more unreal. Celia, in her white dress, might have seemed insubstantial if he had not held her tightly.

Celia spoke in a small, troubled voice.

"Don. I want to tell you something. I feel I'm partly— becoming myself again."

"How do you mean?"

"When I thought you were dead . . ."

"Don't! That’s all over now!"

"No. - Please let me finish." She stopped and faced him. "When I thought you were dead, I didn't seem to care about anything. Then, at Christmas, Margot died. Did Thorley tell you?"

"Yes”

There was nothing more he could say. A light breeze, the first stirring on that hot night, made a whispering among leaves.

"You know how it is when you're," she pressed her hand against her breast, "you're all mixed up inside. You get a thing, an idee fixe, about whatever seems most important. Not that this matter about Margot isn't important It is. But it doesn't seem to matter so much now."

She paused for a moment

"So," Celia went on, "you do things you'd never dream of doing, in the ordinary way. Just as I did after Christmas. When you look back on them," she laughed a little, "they seem grotesque. I'm frightened now at my own temerity. And yet I was right! I was right!"

He put his hands on her shoulders. "My dear, what are you talking about?"

"Listen, Don. We're not out taking a casual walk, really. We're—meeting somebody."

"Oh? Who is it?"

"Dr. Shepton. There's a secret that so far I haven't told to a soul outside the family, except Dr. Shepton."

"He was Margot's doctor, wasn't he?"

"Yes. I knew he was coming to town today to see a friend of his, in Devonshire Place: a psychiatrist. About me. But I couldn't ask Dr. Shepton to come to the house. I couldn't! They spy on me. They think I'm mad, you know."

Despite the slight jar of hearing that word from Celia's own lips, as though she had uttered a blasphemy, he almost laughed at her.

"Do they, now?" he said mockingly.

"Didn't Thorley tell you?"

"Yes," replied Holden. Wrath boiled up inside him, hurting and blinding: the memory of Thorley's glutinous voice, trying to spoil happiness and pull apart dreams that had become realities. "Yes, by God! He told me. And the more I see of Mr. Thorley Ruddy Marsh, the fellow I once thought was my best friend—!"

"Don. You don't believe I'm ... ? No! Please! Don't kiss me for just a minute. I want you to understand something."

The deep earnestness of her voice held him bade

"If I go on with this," Celia whispered, "something dreadful will probably happen. And yet it's right. Besides, I don't see how I can back out now. That one man would have been safe enough, the old friend of Mammy Two. But now that I've actually written to the police . . ."

"You've written to the police? About what?"

"Come here," Celia requested. "Follow me."

On their right, where the row of trees was interrupted, he could discern a very tall privet hedge closed off by iron railings. In the fence there was a wide gate, left ajar. The gate creaked as he followed Celia's white dress through a deep arch in the hedge, round a corner, and into an open space.

It was a children's playground: surrounded on three sides by hedges, on the fourth by another iron fence which showed dim fields of the park beyond. It was not large. Moonlight lay eerily on the iron ribs of swings, on a children's roundabout swing with a circular platform, on a forlorn-looking seesaw, on a very large oblong sandbox set a little below ground. The ground, scuffed and trampled free of grass, exhaled a dry earthy smell on that hot night No place, deserted, could have seemed more secret or more desolate; it might have been a playground for dead children.

Celia lifted her arms above her head, in a gesture of passionate emotion. He could not see her face. She stopped by the roundabout swing; on a sudden impulse she stretched out her hand and set the swing turning. It creaked a little, the platform rising and falling as it swept around.

"Don," she said, "Margot didn't die of cerebral hemorrhage. She died of poison. She committed suicide."

He had been expecting something like this, of course. Yet all the same it took him aback. He had been expecting .. .well, what had he been expecting?

"She killed herself, I tell you!" cried Celia.

"But why should Margot kill herself?"

"Because of the life Thorley'd been leading her." The swing had been slowing down; Celia gave it another fierce turn. Then her voice grew quiet "Tell me, Don. You say Thorley is, or was, your best friend. How would you describe him?"

"I'm not sure. He's changed. I think this determination to get on in life has gone to his head. But at least: easy going, rather phlegmatic, and good-tempered."

"You really think that?"

"It’s what I've always believed, anyway."

"I saw him hit her across the side of the face with a razor strap," said Celia. "And then throw her across a chair and start to strangle her. That had been happening, off and on, whenever he got really annoyed, for three or four years."

This was growing worse and worse. The creak of the roundabout jarred thinly, under a placid moon.

"And it wasn't as though," Celia's voice faltered, "she had ever done anything to deserve it. Margot was so—so inoffensive. That's the word. She never meant anybody the least harm. You know that, Don."

He did know it

"She may not have been very intelligent or 'artistic' in Danvers Locke's sense of the term," Celia went on. "But she was so beautiful, Don! And such a good sport that. . ." Celia stopped. "On Thorley's side, I'll do him the justice to say that so far as I know there wasn't any other woman. It was simply meanness, and spitefulness. Thorley was too prudent to take out his ill-temper on anybody else. So it had to be Margot."

Holden tried to marshal his wits in this nightmare. "And you say," he demanded, "this had been going on since—?"

"Since about a year after Mammy Two died. Margot was frantic about it; she used to weep, when nobody saw her. But she would never tell me anything about it, when I tried to ask her. I was only the Little Sister, though I'm twenty-eight now."

"Was Margot still in love with him?"

Celia shivered. "She loathed him. And do you think Thorley was ever once, for one minute, in love with her? Oh, no. It was the money, and the social side of it. In your heart, Don, you must have guessed that."

"But, hang it, Celia, why was all this allowed to go on? Why didn't she leave him? Or divorce him?"

Celia gave another savage turn to the swing, whose shadows moved up and down on the scarred brown earth. Then Celia swung round to face him.

" 'Extreme physical cruelty.'" Her lips made a movement of distaste. "It sounds almost funny, doesn't it, when you read about it in the newspapers? 'My husband hit me about,' like a brawl in a cheap pub. It isn't funny; it's horrible. But some women are so dreadfully respectable, and have such a horror of what people will say, that they'll go on and on and put up with anything, rather than have a soul know it isn't a happy marriage.

"Margot had a horror of any kind of scandal. So has Thorley, of course; more so than Margot. But the—the source was different Thorley's frightened of the social effect on his friends. He's standing for Parliament, you know, at the next Frinley by-election. But Margot’s was a sort of .. . of ..."

"Noblesse oblige?"

"Something like that. Something Mammy Two instilled into her." Celia's lips were wry in the moonlight, her face pallid, her eyes shining. "You see, Don: Margot was respectable. Whereas I'm not. No, don't smile; I'm not, really." Her voice rose. "But, oh, Don, what a relief it is to tell you all thisj What a blessed reliefl"

And once more, for the dozenth time, they were in each other’s arms: in a dangerous and exalted emotional state.

"Margot," Celia said, "would have died rather than say what was going on. And that's it, don't you see? She couldn't endure it any longer. So she took some kind of poison that the doctor wouldn't recognize as poison, and she—she did die. She died a 'natural' death."

Holden's heart was beating with a slow, heavy rhythm.

"Listen, Celia. Hadn't any other possibility occurred to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean Margot wasn't what I, or anybody else, would have called a suicidal type. Can't you see any alternative?" "What alternative?" "Murder," said Holden.

The ugly word, which under any other circumstances it might have been impossible to utter, sounded louder than it really was. It seemed to ring out amid the looming shapes of the children's swings, and the seesaw, and the sandbox. It had a curious effect

He felt Celia grow tense. Since her head was lowered, the fleecy brown hair brushing his cheek, he sensed rather than saw the sudden turn of her eyes, sideways, while she hardly seemed to breathe. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper.

"Why do you say that?"

"Just one or two things I noticed tonight There may not be anything in it" "Th-Thorley?"

"I didn't say Thorley." (But he had meant it). "I feel like a suspicious sort of hound," he burst out, "for thinking what I am thinking! All the same . . ."

"If it could be!" breathed Celia in a kind of ecstasy. "Oh, if only it could be! To see him hang, after all he made her suffer!" Celia shook her head violently. "I—I'd thought of that Don. Of course I had. But if s not true, I'm afraid. It can't be true."

"For the sake of argument, why not?"

Celia hesitated.

"Because," she answered, "I don't see why he should want her out of the way. I don't see any motive. I suppose you could say Margot was—was useful to him. And then there are so many other reasons! Margot’s changing her gown on the night she died, and the poison bottle openly on the shelf . . ."

"Wait a minute! What's all this about gowns and poison bottles?"

"You'll understand, dear, as soon as Dr. Shepton gets here. And finally, as a reason why I'm sure it wasn't Thorley, I—I'd better tell you Margot tried to kill herself once before."

(Black waters, swirling and rising! That metaphor of his, fancied this evening, had come from a true instinct.) "Once before," Holden echoed dully. "When was that?" "Over a year before she really did die." "And on that occasion how did she try to kill herself?" "She took strychnine."

"Strychnine!"

'Tes. I know it was strychnine, because I looked up the symptoms she had. Margot had tetanic convulsions: they end in lockjaw, the book said. But Dr. Shepton managed to save her. Afterward Margot admitted it to me, or as good as." Celia threw back her head. "Don, what's wrong?"

"There's something very much wrong. If I remember cor’ recdy, the only kind of book Margot ever opened was a detective story or a murder trial?"

"We-elL no. For a long time she'd been terribly keen about palmistry and fortune telling. But she did read murder trials. I don't I loathe them. And it’s odd you should mention murder trials, because ..."

"In fact," he was searching his memory, "I once recall talking to Margot about the trial of Jean Pierre Vaquier. That's a strychnine case."

"Is it? That's out of my line, I'm afraid. But what about it?"

"Strychnine, Celia, is the most agonizingly painful poison in the register. Nobody in his or her senses would think of using it for suicide. Margot would never have done that of her own free will!"

Celia stared at him.

"But—Margot as good as admitted it to me, though she didn't dare say too much! I thought Thorley'd been given a good scare over it Because, only a few weeks after she was up and about, Margot began to grow like her old self again (only far happier) before she was married. Happy, and bright eyed. That lasted until... well, until almost before she died."

Celia paused. With another sharp change of mood, her eyes grew fixed.

"Listen!" she urged. "Don't speak! There's somebody coming in from the road now!"

CHAPTER V

Quickly Celia drew away from him. There was, in fact, a distant noise of somebody blundering about in the around-the-corner entrance to the hedge. But, when the newcomer emerged into the moonlight, Holden could not fail to recognize Dr. Eric Shepton.

Dr. Shepton was a tall, heavily built, stoop-shouldered man with a near-sighted air and a somewhat shambling gait But he was still vigorous; the near-sighted eyes behind his pince-nez could at times be disconcertingly keen.

His bald head shone, indistinguishable in color from the clear-white hair above his ears. Winter and summer he wore the same heavy dark suit, with gold watch chain across the waistcoat; he was now carrying an old Panama hat. He stood blinking and peering, turning his head from side to side, until he caught sight of Celia.

Celia's inexplicable terror, which should have disappeared when she found the newcomer was only Dr. Shepton, was increasing. Holden, startled, saw a look of panic flash across her face: as though she wanted to wring her hands, as though she had just remembered something which in a welter of emotions had been forgotten.

"I should have warned you," she whispered.

And there was worse. As Celia called out to the doctor, Holden detected a new note in her voice—a note of sheer defensiveness.

"I'm over here, Dr. Shepton!" she said in a high, breathless voice. "Terribly sorry to drag you to such an odd place at a time like this."

There was a shambling noise of Dr. Shepton's big shoes on the sandy earth as he moved toward them.

"Er—not at all," he disclaimed, as though appointments in a playground at such a time were all in his routine. He had, as always, that half-apologetic air which was a relic of his Victorian boyhood: when the social status of medical men, for some reason, was not very high. But he kept his eyes fixed steadily on Celia. "After all," he added, "it’s quite close to your house. Bit difficult to find, though. I'm a countryman. London upsets me."

Then his near-sighted eyes blinked round, discovering for the first time that Celia had a companion. Since the doctor had seen Holden not more than three or four times in past years, he knew nothing of the latter’s history or supposed death; no explanations were necessary.

"Dr. Shepton," continued Celia in that same breathless voice, "this is Mr.—I beg your pardon! Its 'Sir Donald' now, isn't it? Dr. Shepton of course you remember Sir Donald Holden?"

"Yes, of course," murmured the doctor, who clearly didn't

"Er—how do you do, sir?" And he made a slight gesture with the ancient Panama hat

"He's—he's just come back from abroad," said Celia.

"Ah, indeed. Fascinating place, abroad. Pity one can't go there now." Dr. Shepton became brisk. "And now, my dear, if this gentleman will excuse us?"

"Nol" cried Celia. "I want Don to stay!"

"But I understand; my dear, you wished to see me privately."

"I tell you, I want Don to stay!"

Dr. Shepton twisted round courteously. "Had you any special reason, sir, for wishing to ... er ... ?"

"Sir," returned Holden in the same formal, way, "I have the very best reason in the world. Miss Devereux, I hope, will shortly become my wife."

Dr. Shepton, even though clothed in age and (an air of) absent-mindedness, could not repress a start, and a worried look which gave Holden a momentary qualm. The doctor put up a hand to his pince-nez.

"Ah, indeed," he smiled. "That's fine, of course. Many congratulations. At the same time, if you'll forgive me, we mustn't be too hasty about these things; must we?"

"Why not?" asked Holden.

The two words hung out, a whipcrack and a challenge, in that quiet place. Dr. Shepton gave the appearance of not having heard.

"And what my dear," he asked Celia in his patient kindly voice, "did you want to see me about?"

"I," Celia glanced at Holden, and faltered, "I wanted to tell you about the night Margot died."

"Again?" inquired Dr. Shepton.

"Listen, my dear." Putting his ancient Panama hat on the back of his head, Dr. Shepton took one of Celia's hands and enclosed it in both of his. "On Christmas day, shortly after your poor sister's death, you came to me and told me —er—what happened that night Don't you remember?"

"Of course I remember!"

"Then come, my dearl Why distress yourself by going all over it again, six months after if s finished and done with?"

"Because there's new evidence! Or there will be, tomorrow night" Celia hesitated. "Besides, now Don's back with me, I want him to hear about it! I've been telling him . . ."

Dr. Shepton peered sideways. "Have you told this gentleman, Celia, about Mr. Marsh's brutal treatment of your sister?" “Yes!"

' And about the—er—attempt at strychnine poisoning some considerable time before Mrs. Marsh died?" "Yes!"

"And about your own experience in the Long Gallery, among the portraits, following Mrs. Marsh's death?"

"No!" said Celia. Even in the moonlight, Holden thought, her face was noticeably paler. "No. I haven't said anything about that. But... dear God," she breathed, in a real prayer which went to Holden's heart in a stab of sympathy as deep as his overwhelming love for her, "won't anybody listen to what really happened on the night Margot was poisoned?"

"Why not let her tell it?" said Holden, in a voice that meant a good deal more than the words.

"As you like." Dr. Shepton looked at him curiously. "Perhaps that would be best. Yes, on the whole that might be best. Er—is there any place to sit down?"

There was no obvious place to sit down: unless (the grotesque thought occurred to Holden) they occupied several swings. But Celia was already looking, with a strange fixity, at the immense oblong sandbox, set about a foot below the level of the ground.

Slowly she walked over to the sandbox. Celia sat down on the edge of it, swinging her legs inside. Putting one hand on the ground on each side of it, she leaned back—supple, graceful, not so tall as Margot—to stare up at the moon. Dr. Shepton, without any sense of incongruity, humped down big and stoop-shouldered on one side of her. Holden was at the other side.

Celia lowered her eyes. The sand seemed to fascinate her. It was dry sand, in the ten days' intense heat following a wet June. Celia scooped up a handful, letting the sand run between her fingers.

"The sand, the lock, and the sleeping sphinx!" she said, suddenly and unexpectedly. Her laugh, clear and ringing, echoed eerily under the trees. "I can't help it It's awfully funny. The sand, the lock, and the sleeping sphinx!"

"Steady, my dearl" Dr. Shepton said rather sharply.

Celia brought herself up. "Yes. Of c-course!"

"You had something on your mind—eh?—about two days before Christmas?"

"Yes. Christmas," Celia repeated, and closed her eyes.

"I was telling Don," she went on, "that for a long time before then Margot had seemed so much happier, so much more like herself. She was so bright eyed, and danced and hummed round the house so much, that I once said to her (only as a joke, of course), ‘You must have a lover.' Margot said no; she said she was going to a fortune teller, a Madame Somebody-or-other, in New Bond Street of all places, who told her tremendous things about the future.

"Then, about October, the trouble started again. There were dreadful scenes with Thorley; I could hear him shouting at her behind a closed door. Presently, at the beginning of December I think it was, things quieted down again. When we went down to Caswall for Christmas, we were at least all polite."

Celia kicked out at the sand.

"I love Caswall," she said simply. "When you go inside and close the door, you can imagine you're not in the present at all. The Blue Sitting Room! And the Lacquer Room! And the Long Gallery! The books and books and books! The old playroom, with the games and toy printing press with three different kinds of colored type!

"Anyway," she drew a deep breath, "it was only a small party. Maybe Thorley told you, Don? Margot and Thorley and myself; and, of course, Derek."

It was that "of course" which did it Holden could keep quiet no longer.

"I imagine," he observed, in his turn scooping up a handful of sand and flinging it violently down, "I imagine that 'Derek' refers to Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore, M.P.?"

Celia looked at him with wide eyes.

"Yes! Do you know Derek?"

"No," answered Holden with cold and measured vicious-ness. "I—merely—hate—the—swine." "But you don't know him!"

"That's just it, Celia. If I did know him, I probably shouldn't dislike him. If s just because I don't know him that I've been endowing him with all sorts of super and magnetic qualities. What's the ba—what's the fellow like?"

"He's rather nice, really. Tall, and with wavy hair"—she saw Holden's disgust—"good heavens, not effeminate! Just the opposite: rather jaw thrusting. He smiles a good deal, and shows his teeth. Don!" Consternation sprang into Celia's eyes, and she sat up. "You didn't think . .. ?"

"Well, you were his parliamentary secretary for some time, I understand. Weren't there rumors?" "Derek tried to make love to me. Yes." "I see."

Celia, her cheeks coloring darkly in the moonlight, avoided his eye. Scooping up more sand she slowly let it fall.

"Don, I—I'm not sure if yon understand. If Margot had taken a lover, I shouldn't have blamed her. In fact, I should have thought it was an excellent thing. But it wouldn't do for me, don't you see? Because—whoever I had been with, if you know what I mean, I should always have been thinking about you; and it would just have seemed silly."

There was a silence.

"Celia," he said, "I'm humbled. I . . ."

Here he became aware of Dr. Shepton, immobile and sphinx-like—where had that word occurred to him?—sitting at the right angle of the sandbox, shoulders stooped, large-knuckled hands on knees, his hat off again and his big head inclined forward so that the chin almost touched the knuckles. Dr. Shepton was steadily watching him with a gaze in which appraisal mingled with something unreadable. The doctor's gaze shifted.

"You were saying, my dear," he addressed Celia, "that you arrived at Caswall on the afternoon of December twenty-third. The four of you, I believe, were going to a party that night?"

Celia nodded, biting at her underlip.

"Yes. We were going," she spoke to Holden again, passionately, "to Widestairs, to the Lockes' place. Formal evening dress had only just come back in again, and we were dressing for it. Please remember that; it’s very important.”

"I don't think you've been at Caswall, Don, since Margot and Thorley had a suite of rooms done over for themselves on the east side over the Long Gallery. Everything very modern. A bathroom with green tiles and a black marble tub that didn't clank like the other tubs at Caswall. Margot had a lovely sitting room in white satin, and a bedroom in old rose: the bedroom opening into the bathroom, with Thorley's rooms beyond. I want you to see all this; I tell you it’s very important.

"It was a cold night, not quite freezing, with a little snow. It wasn't very chilly inside, because Thorley had got thirty tons of coal (yes, thirty tons). But the hot-water system wouldn't work; Obey had been carrying up little cans of hot water for washing. I finished dressing first So I went over and knocked at the door of Margot’s bedroom.

"Margot wasn't nearly ready yet. She was standing in front of the big triple mirror around the dressing table, in her step-ins and stockings, with a wrap over her shoulders, and scrabbling about among things on the dressing table. She called out to me: 'Darling, do go and look in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and see if my nail varnish has wandered in there.'

"I went and looked. The medicine cabinet is built into the wall, just over the wash basin, behind a mirror. There were about three dozen bottles there, all crammed together on the shelves. But I saw the nail varnish, right enough. I was just stretching out my hand for it when I saw the poison bottle. I tell you," Celia almost screamed, "I saw the poison bottle!"

Dr. Shepton glanced round quickly, and shushed her.

"Of course, my dear," he said. "Of course. So you told me. Now think very hard: what sort of poison was in the bottle?"

(A strange sort of chill was creeping into Don Holden's heart. He could not understand why, or would have said he could not understand.)

"What sort of poison," persisted the doctor in his bluff kindly voice, "was in the bottle?"

"But I don't know! How could I?"

"Can you describe this bottle?"

"It was round and brownish colored, maybe two or three ounces, with a label that said Not to be taken, and then in red letters, poison."

"Was it a chemist's label? Anything else on it except those words?"

"N-no. At least I don't remember. The main thing, Dr. Shepton, is that it was new—if you understand what I mean —among old dusty bottles with withered-looking labels. I swear it had just been put there!"

"Go on, my dear."

"The funny thing was," continued Celia, reaching out to grasp Holden's hand, "it didn't frighten me so much at first I mean, it seemed so open. If you were going to poison yourself, after trying once with strychnine as Margot did, you'd think you would hide the poison; and not put it there only partly hidden between a bottle of Optrex and a tin of talcum powder.

"I came out and gave the nail varnish to Margot. I watched her getting dressed. She was wearing a silver lame gown— please remember that, Don—a silver lame gown, and she looked stunning in it At last I said: 'Margot, about that bottle in the medicine cabinet' She turned round from the mirror and said: 'What bottle in the medicine cabinet?' But just then Thorley came in; and in a very cold voice he said we were half an hour late and would we please, please, please hurry?

"Thorley had been like that all evening: so white that Obey asked whether he was ill, and with furious dead-looking eyes. He was very polite, too. Margot was—excited. I don't know how else to describe it Quick breathing, as though she'd made a decision and meant to keep to it

"Neither of them spoke much, in the car on the way to the Lockes'. Derek Hurst-Gore kept laughing and telling jokes, but Thorley didn't say much even to him. At the Lockes', after dinner . . . Did Thorley tell you?"

"He said," Holden answered, "that you played games."

"Games!" echoed Celia, and moved her shoulders convulsively. "He didn't tell you about that ghastly one where we dressed up in masks? As executed murderers?"

"No."

Despite himself Holden had to fight down a growing nervousness. This picture Celia painted, against a background of cold night and a few drifting snowflakes, was anything but a Christmas atmosphere. Dr. Shepton did not move or speak.

"You've seen Sir Danvers' collection of masks," Celia went on. "Hung all over the walls in so many rooms. Some impressionistic. Some modeled from real life. Some that even go over your head. Nearly all of them painted and lifelike, murderers' masks, as they looked after they'd been executed?"

"No." Holden cleared his throat "No. I didn't know it"

"Neither did we," Celia confessed. "Until he took us upstairs, with only the light of a candle to make it more effective, and unlocked the door of a little box room and showed us. Everybody had been drinking pretty freely, or I expect he wouldn't have done it.

"Besides ourselves and Sir Danvers, there was Lady Locke, and Doris looking perfectly exquisite (she is a nice child), and young Ronnie Merrick who's so mad about Doris. I don't think I shall ever forget people's expressions when Sir Danvers unlocked the door, and held up the candle, and we saw all those lifelike horrors looking at us without eyes.

"Sir Danvers explained that most of them were impressionistic. But three of four (he wouldn't say which) had been taken direct—first in wet paper, then in papier-mache—from real death masks preserved in the museums at Scotland Yard and Centre Street and the Surete in Paris. Afterward they'd been colored to the likeness of these people after death, after the pain of death; with real hair or beard attached; and, in some cases, with the mark of the rope still..." "Celial For God's sake stop upsetting yourself!" Her hand, in Holden's, was cold and trembling. She drew it away as he cried out a protest Dr. Shepton remained uncannily motionless and silent And Celia went on.

"The idea, Sir Danvers said, was that we were to play an old-fashioned game of Murder. Only, this time, we were each to wear the mask of a famous murderer in real life. Afterward, when the 'murder' had been committed, we were each to answer questions as much as possible in the manner of the original.

"So he began handing out the masks at random, saying who each one was.

"Everybody was delighted with the idea, or pretended to be. And I daresay it's all very well if you're well read in crime, and can tell all about these people and play your part

"Thorley was Landru, the French Bluebeard, with a thin bald skull and a ginger beard; they guillotined him. Derek was George Joseph Smith, the brides-in-the-bath murderer. Those two I did know. Oh, and Margot. Margot said: ‘I won't be Old Mother Dyer; she's too awful looking; let me be Edith Thompson!' Doris Locke was Mrs. Pearcey, with front teeth sticking out a little. And Lady Locke—who's terribly sophisticated, like her husband—was big Kate Webster, with red hair. They all seemed pleased.

"But Ronnie Merrick, who was dithering, whispered to me: ‘My name's Dr. Buchanan, but I don't know who the hell I am or what I'm supposed to have done; can you help me?' And I said: 'I'm Maria Manning; but I can't tell you who I am either.'

"Just then Sir Danvers came up, very lean and elegant. He was to be the detective in the game; his mask was a relic, a metal one worn by a German executioner in the seventeenth century. It had a pointed chin, like a combination of a skull and a fox's mask; it was sort of greenish and rust colored. When he suddenly thrust it down into my face, I grabbed at Ronnie for support

"Yes; I think everybody had taken too much to drink.

"Because afterward, during the game . . .

"You know how, at parties, a sort of devil gets into people? And the blood rushes to their heads, and they go too

"Downstairs, where we played the game, it was all dark except for a big bowl of lighted spirits set burning in the hall: burning and wavering with a bluish flame. With the masks and hair, and eyes looking out through the eyeholes, nobody was real. They kept wandering up and down, up and down, past that bowl of bluish flame. The bald head of Landru, the projecting teeth of Mrs. Pearcey, the scrubby moustache of Dr. Buchanan. But they kept—of course it was only a joke—but they kept moaning, you know; and suddenly darting at each other before fading back into the dark again.

"I ... I dare say I looked worse than any of them. My Maria Manning mask was swollen, one eye open and the other partly shut, though it was die face of a woman who had been pretty. And all of a sudden I thought to myself: Suppose this thing against my face is one of the real masks, and I'm looking out through the eyes of a woman standing on the scaffold?

"Then someone 'screamed,' to show the crime had been committed.''

Celia drew a deep breath.

"Oddly enough," she laughed nervously, "oddly enough, the person who turned out to be 'murdered' was Margot

"It was better, of course, with the lights on. Sir Danvers started a tremendous cross-examination of everybody. Some of the parts, I admit, were very well played. Derek—Derek Hurst-Gore was awfully good as George Joseph Smith, who killed the brides in the bath."

"I’ll bet he was," said Holden.

"Because he's a lawyer, you see, and well up in the case. But," and Celia clenched her hands, "there was something wrong in all that questioning. I didn't understand it; I can't explain it; I could only feel it Perhaps it was only because we were warm and tired and a bit ashamed of ourselves. But Sir Danvers, standing under the mistletoe in the hall with our group of masked monstrosities around him, still couldn't find the murderer.

"It went on and on. Finally Lady Locke, who's usually the most self-possessed of mortals, cried out: 'Oh, let’s end this.. Who is guilty?' That's where (of all people, as a sort of anticlimax) young Doris Locke carefully lifted the mask off her hair. She said: ‘I’m Mrs. Pearcey; once I killed my rival, and cut up her body and wheeled her in a pram; and this time I've got away with it' And," added Celia, "everybody roared with laughter, and things were normal again."

CHAPTER VI

“Normal again," repeated Holden.

He tried to speak without irony. Momentarily he had forgotten that they were sitting round a children's sandbox, in a dark comer of Regent's Park at what must be close to midnight. Instead he saw himself at Widestairs, in the cold hall among the wry-mouthed masks, as Celia had wished him to do.

Celia's eyes and imagination were those of the dreamer, the poet She was intensely conscious of, and moved by, all outward things: shapes and colors, the texture of a cloth or the inflection of a voice, which she could reproduce with extraordinary vividness. But of inner meanings, the human motives behind the look or gesture, she knew little and could guess less.

She was utterly unsuspicious. It never occurred to her . ..

It never occurred to her, Holden realized, that there might be a flaming and dangerous love affair between Thorley Marsh and Doris Locke.

This, his original idea, had earlier occurred to him only in a fleeting way. But it couldn't be escaped. When he remembered Thorley and Doris springing apart in the gloom as he appeared at the window, when he remembered the unopened telegram, when he remembered Thorley's whole disturbed conduct, it became a certainty.

Such an affair, of course, might have begun after Margofs death. After all, Thorley had been a widower for more than six months. And, if marriage were contemplated—well, Thorley was thirty-nine or forty and Doris only nineteen; but no insurmountable difficulty could be made over that and there might be far worse matches from the money point of view. Only one black, crawling question remained.

Suppose the affair had begun before Margot’s death?

Would Thorley, no matter how much he might have ill-treated Margot, have gone so far as to. .. ?

Holden's thoughts were drawn back to the present by the fact that Celia had been speaking to Dr. Shepton in a low, quick, blurred voice, and the doctor was answering in his quiet benevolent way.

"Of course, my dear! But you understand that the murderers' masks in that game made a very deep impression on you? A deep, deep impression."

"Naturally," Celia agreed in a tight-throated voice. "It made me partly responsible for Margot’s death."

Two voices exclaimed, "Nonsense!" with Dr. Shepton's exclamation perhaps a trifle quicker than Holden's. But Celia would not be denied.

"I knew there was a bottle of poison in that medicine cabinet at Caswall," she insisted, with slow and restrained lucidity. "I knew that I'd seen Margot in that mood of hers: all flushed, as though she'd come to a decision. It shouldn't have required much intelligence to realize what decision.

"And yet, when we got back to Caswall that night, what did I do?

"Instead of going to Margot, instead of speaking to her, instead of emptying that wretched poison bottle down the drain, what did I do? I was so upset by the 'murder' game, which you'll admit was stupid of me, that I didn't do a thing.

"I had plenty of time, too. We'd got back early, at not much past eleven o'clock. But, oh, no! I must hurry off to my room and be by myself! The funny thing is that in spite of my nerves I felt as exhausted as if I'd been playing tennis since morning. I was dizzy; I could hardly get undressed. Maybe it was all that sherry.

"I dreamed, too. I dreamed I was standing on a platform, in an open space, over a huge crowd that was all shouting and jeering and singing my name to the tune of 'Oh, Susannah’ it was foul; it was beastly. People kept walking about the wooden platform. I couldn't see anybody, because there was a white bag over my face. Then I knew there was a greasy cord round my neck. "That’s all I do remember, when ... "Somebody took me by the shoulder and shook me. I saw it was Thorley. There was an orange light in the room, from the sun coming up, and a crackly kind of cold. Thorley was standing beside me, in a dressing gown, with his hair rumpled and stubble on his face. All he said was:

" "You'd better get up, Celia. Your sister is dead." And here, as she approached the climax of her story, Celia's whole bearing changed. In her voice there was no tremor, not a trace of nervousness. The voice rang cold and clear and hard, with a hardness and determination Holden had never suspected in her nature. Celia was sitting up very straight, her knees together, her red shoes dug into sand, the beautiful neck a little arched, her hands flat on the ground. He never remembered her better than at that moment.

So the cold metallic voice measured out its syllables.

"Thorley didn't say, 'Margot is dead.' He said, 'Your sister is dead,' like a solicitor or an undertaker. I just looked at him. Presently he started to gabble something like, 'She was taken with a fit in the night, before she'd gone to bed; I called Dr. Shepton, and we put her to bed and did what we could; but she died a little while ago.' And he told me how he'd found her on the chaise longue in her sitting room. And then: 'Dr. Shepton is downstairs now, writing out the death certificate!'

"That was all.

"I didn't say anything. I got up, and put on my dressing gown, and ran across to Margot's bedroom, and opened the door.

"The curtains weren't drawn; the orange light was streaming in. Margot was lying in bed, very peaceful, in a rucked-up nightgown. She would have been thirty-six yean old in January; she was so fond of young people. I didn't touch her. She had that dead look, just as Mammy Two had. I looked at her for a minute; then I ran into the bathroom. My hands were perfectly steady then, and I searched all through that medicine cabinet.

"The poison bottle, which I had seen the night before, wasn't there."

Celia paused for an instant

"I went back into the bedroom again, and looked at her. The whole house seemed as still and dead as Margot. Presently (in that way you're aware of things before you really see them) I noticed something else. I noticed her clothes, scattered all over the place just as Thorley and Dr. Shepton had thrown them down.

"Now I told you, I carefully impressed on you, that on the evening before Margot had been wearing a silver lame gown. But the gown I saw now, thrown down across a chair, was black. It was a black velvet, cut low, with a diamond clasp at the left shoulder. I'd never seen her wear it

"Scattered across the foot of the bed, and on the floor, were gray stockings, and black shoes with rhinestone buckles, and step-ins, and a suspender belt That I think, was where I understood everything.

"Margot was romantic and sentimental. That black dress had some sentimental association with the last time she wore it or some time she wore it. So after the Lockes' party she came back here, and in the dead of night she changed her clothes and dressed again as though for a great dinner. (That's what I might do if I were going to commit suicide, though I should never have the courage and I admit it.) Margot swallowed the poison. She threw the bottle out of the bathroom window. And she walked into her sitting room, and stretched herself out on the chaise longue to die.

"She'd often said she might And now she had.

"I turned around and flew into the sitting room. The electric lights were still blazing there—she'd have left them on, of course—and I saw the ashes of a big fire in the grate. I had one more chance to make sure.

"Margot always kept a diary. She wrote pages and pages and pages; I can t think how; I could never keep a diary myself. It was always there, in a big locked book, in a Chinese Chippendale desk in her sitting room. I found the book, unlocked; but the diary for all the year had been cut out. In the fireplace . . .

"I remember noticing, in a vague kind of way, that among the fire irons there were now two pokers: one of them brass handled, from among the fire irons in Margot’s bedroom. But there wasn't anything left of the diary. It was all powdered ash, burnt page by page, on top of the other ashes.

"She was still being respectable, you see. She didn't want anybody to know. I looked around the room, white-satin and gold, with the dark-red carpet and the crimson curtains, and I saw that chaise longue. It was over there, you know, that Thorley tried to strangle her.

"A kind of craziness came over me then. I raced out of the sitting room, through the old-rose bedroom where Margot was lying dead, and into the bathroom again. I felt I must, I must - must be certain that poison bottle wasn't in the medicine cabinet. I started to go over the bottles again. But this time my hands were shaking. Down came one bottle, then another and another, crash bang clatter into the wash basin, with a noise that filled the place and deafened you.

"I looked up. And there was Thorley, standing in the doorway to his bedroom, with his left hand gripped around the sill of the door, looking at me.

"In the bathroom there's a high-built swing-together window of colored glass, that never would latch or fit together properly; I remember feeling an icy-cold current of air against the back of my neck.

"Thorley said, in a high voice: 'What the hell are you up to?'

"I said, 'You did this.' And then, as he just looked at me and took a step forward from the door, I said, 'You killed her with the way you treated her, just as surely as though you'd given her that poison yourself. And I'll pay you back for it, Thorley Marsh.'

"All of a sudden his left hand swung back, and he banged it against his razor strap hanging on the wall beside the wash basin.

"And I said, 'Go on. Hit me with that razor strap, just as you did Margot. But I won't take it meekly, like Margot. You'd better understand that'

"For a second he didn't answer anything; he only breathed. Then—which was what made me sick—he smiled. He smiled under all that stubble on his face: a really gentle, affectionate, martyred kind of smile. You'd have sworn butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and he'd fly straight up to heaven among the holy angels.

"He said: 'Celia, you're upset Go and get dressed.' And he went back into his bedroom, and closed the door."

Again Celia paused. All this, even the account of her conversation with Thorley, had been delivered in the same cold, level, unemotional tone. In conclusion, as she kicked out at the sand, her voice was almost casual.

"Margot was buried in the new family vault in Caswall churchyard. Do you remember, Don, how Mammy Two always said she wanted to be buried in the new vault, because the old one was so crowded?"

"Yes. I remember."

"Mammy Two never did get her wish," said Celia. "The new tomb wasn't finished until after her death. But, a day or so before Margot's funeral—because, mind you, Thorley said it would add sanctity and solemnity and I believe he added 'swank' to the new vault—some coffins of the old, old Devereuxs were carried down to it and interred there. Even in death Margot isn't with Mammy Two, or our own parents. Ob, no! She's with ..."

Here Celia's voice did change, in fury and anguish. She sprang to her feet, stepping back out of the sandbox, and stood breathing hard and fast

"Dr. Shepton," she pleaded, "you were the one who attended Margot. Can't you say something?"

"Yes, Doctor," Holden agreed grimly. "I was about to ask you the same question."

Dr. Shepton, with a grunt and shamble, also got to his feet. Holden followed him. Automatically Dr. Shepton adjusted his pince-nez. His broad face, with the fringe of white hair fluffed out round the bald head, wore a benevolent air as he turned to Celia.

"Well, my dear?" he asked pleasantly.

"Well—what?"

"Don't you feel better?" inquired the doctor. Celia stared at him. "Yes. Of c-course I feel better! But . . ."

"Exactly!" Dr. Shepton nodded. "Thafs where the Roman Catholic Church is so wise in the matter of confession; though, of course," his broad face wrinkled up in half-humorous apology, "nowadays we add frills and give it some scientific name. Now, Celia, as an old friend of your family for many years, I want you to do me a little favor. Will you do it?"

"Yes! Certainlyl If I can."

"Good!" said Dr. Shepton. He reflected. 'Tomorrow, as I understand it, you're going to Caswall for a few days. I— er—believe Mr. Marsh wants to look over the property with a view to selling it."

Holden saw Celia's start, though this was evidently not news to her. But Dr. Shepton's attention was occupied with other matters.

"We-ell!" said the doctor, waving his hand tolerantly. "That's all right! A few days in the country; country air; bit of a holiday; can't stand London myself. It's when you come back to town, Celia, that I want you to do this favor."

Her voice was rising. "What favor?"

Dr. Shepton carefully felt in his upper left-hand waistcoat pocket, then in his upper right-hand pocket, before producing a visiting card. He examined it closely, with a happy and gusty sigh, and handed it to Celia.

"When you get back to town, my dear, I want you to go and see the man whose address is on that card. Mind you! He's a fully qualified medical man, admirable in his own right, as well as being an analyst. I want you to tell him ..."

This was the point at which Don Holden felt he had received a physical blow in the face. The effect on Celia must have been even worse.

'That’s the psychiatrist," Celia said. "You came to London to see him about me. You—you still don't believe a word I've been saying!"

"We-ell, nowl" mused Dr. Shepton, and pursed up his hps. "As a famous character said on a certain occasion, what is truth? The matter . . ."

"Doctor," said Holden, and tried hard to keep his voice from shaking with rage, "you might be good enough to answer one straight question. We've just been listening to a forthright and convincing narrative of facts. Do you, or don't you, believe what Celia says?"

Dr. Shepton considered this.

"Let me answer that question,'' he suggested, "by asking Celia another. Eh?" He addressed Celia persuasively. "Lefs suppose (for the sake of argument, mind!) that Mrs. Marsh did kill herself. Let's suppose Mrs. Marsh was driven by her husband's brutal treatment to take her own life."

"Well?" asked Celia, with her eyes glistening under the long lashes.

'What could you gain, what could you possibly hope to gain, by creating an unpleasant scandal and even (heaven help us!) wanting a post-mortem? The law could take no action against Mr. Marsh. You must see that, my dear. Legally, you couldn't touch him.''

No," Celia answered calmly. "But I can ruin him. I can puncture his thick hide at last. I can ruin him. And I will"

Dr. Shepton was gently shocked. "My dear girl! Come, now!"