The Sleeping Sphinx

It had been built between two cypresses; they did not shade it, but they threw shadows straight ahead on either side. It was square, of heavy gray stone, squat, with a little pillar on each side of a paneled iron door.

"Is that"—Holden's voice seemed to burst out, against thick silence, before he lowered it to a mutter—''is that.. .?"

"The new vault? Yes." Dr. Fell breathed ponderously; either from quick walking or from some emotion. "The old one," he added, "is up on that hill there."

"What exactly are we going to do?"

"As soon as my excellent friend Crawford gets here, we are going to unlock and unseal the door."

"Unseal it?"

"Yes. Merely to take one brief look inside. We shall do no more."

"But Mr. Reid! The old vicar! Will he like this?"

"The vicarage," returned Dr. Fell, "is on the other side of that hill. He will not know. As for one Mr. Windlesham, who is supposed to look after these premises, I have every reason to hope that he is now too full of beer to interfere."

"What do you expect to see in the vault?"

Dr. Fell did not answer this.

"Hear now," he said, "my story."

The crooked little alley leading up to the tomb, with its raised graves on either side, was paved with tiny pebbles. Dr. Fell's canes rattled among the pebbles as he sat down on the big flat stone of one of the raised graves. It was just inside the shadow thrown by the cypress on the right-hand side of the vault.

"I am the sport of fates and devilry," observed Dr. Fell, removing his shovel hat and putting it beside him. "At Christmas (yes, last Christmas) I was the guest of Professor Westbury at Chippenham. Two days after Christmas it occurred to me to go over and pay a call on Mrs. Andrew Devereux."

"On . . . ?"

"Yes. On Mammy Two, who had been dead for several years. That," said Dr. Fell bitterly, "is how we kept in touch with our friends during wartime. Unless they had been blitzed or otherwise hurt by some Satan's toy, we imagined them still as healthy as ever.

"With my customary careful presence of mind, I even neglected to send a telegram or any message. I merely hired a car and was driven the few miles to Caswall. In front of the house, among other motorcars, I saw a hearse."

Dr. Fell paused, putting up his hands to his eyes.

"My dear Holden, I didn't know what to do. My arrival on a social call seemed a little out of place. I was telling the driver of the car to turn round, when someone ran over the bridge and motioned to me. It was—"

"Celia?"

"Yes."

Again for a moment Dr. Fell pondered in silence.

"Now that girl was in a badly disturbed state of mind. One moment! I don't mean what you are thinking. I merely mean that she was not herself; and it worried me badly.

"She asked me if I would please come inside for a few minutes, on a matter of very vital importance. She further said we must on no account be seen. And we were not seen. She led me in through the back way. She led me through a maze of those short little staircases that connect the galleries, up to an old playroom, or nursery, or something of the sort, on the top floor."

A light wind, sweeping up from the south, set rippling the grass in the churchyard and made a dry scratching sound among cypresses. There was a brief rain of shadows until the wind died. What alarmed Holden most was the evident disquiet of Dr. Fell, who kept glancing round at the door of the new vault as though he half-expected to see something come out

The devil of it was, perhaps something would. "That playroom, yes," Holden muttered. "Celia mentioned it last night Anyway, did she tell you anything about... ?" "The circumstances of her sisters death?" "Yes!"

"She told me very little," grunted Dr. Fell. "And we can see now why she didn't On Christmas Day she had gone to Dr. Shepton and poured out her whole story. And Shepton, a trusted old friend, dismissed her very kindly and gently as a psychopathic case." Dr. Fell added, very quietly: "Curse him.’

All Holden's nerves throbbed in agreement with this.

"Dr. Fell, have you seen Shepton?"

"Yes."

"Do yon think he's crooked? Or a fool?" Dr. Fell shook his head.

"The man," he answered, "is neither crooked nor a fool. He is merely very obstinate and very closemouthed; so infernally closemouthed, in fact that. . ."

"Yes? Go on!"

"That," said Dr. Fell, with subdued violence, "he has nearly wrecked half a dozen lives."

"But you were saying? About Celia?"

"She told me," replied Dr. Fell, lowering his head, "that her sister's funeral was that afternoon. She begged me, implored me, pleaded with me to help her with something, —er—hardly needed to tell the young lady," said Dr. Fell with a guilty air, "that if it would help her in any way she could have the shirt off my back.

"She pointed out that we should not be doing anything against the law. That we should not be hurting anybody, or interfering with anything. She even added, with a kind of naivete which troubled me much as it touched me, that it wouldn't even be dark and we needn't be afraid. In short..." "Please let me tell him, Dr. Fell," interposed Celia's voice. Again the wind came rustling and seething across the churchyard. Celia had not come up the path from the church. She had taken a shorter cut, from the north side. They saw her stumbling among gravestones, catching at them to steady herself, among flying shadows.

Celia reached Dr. Fell's side. She looked at Holden, looked at the vault, and faltered. "Dr. Fell," Celia said, "couldn't we call it off?" For a long time Dr. Fell stared at the ground. "Why should you want to call it off, my dear?" "I was frightfully nervous." Again Celia looked at Holden, and smiled uncertainly. "I—I may have been dreaming."

"My dear," began Dr. Fell, and started to fire up again. "We could have forgotten all about it, yes, if only you hadn't written that letter to the police. In it you stressed evidence, direct evidence, which would be found if you and I opened the vault tonight."

(Exactly, Holden thought, what Celia had told Dr. Shepton last night in that playground. But there had been no mention of a vault.)

Celia, drawing a deep breath, went up to him. Her eyes searched his face, intently and questioningly.

"I couldn't tell you, Don," she said. "I couldn't! That’s what's been worrying me all day; that's why I couldn't see you. But I want you to listen now. And don't laugh at me. Call me mad, if you like. Only: please don't laugh at me." "Of course I won't laugh at you." "Two days after Christmas, when Margot was—put in that place," she swung her head round, the soft brown hair flying, to look at the vault, and turned back again, "Dr. Fell and I attended to certain things.

"After the funeral was over, and everybody had left the churchyard, we came here just about dusk. I had the key of the vault it was supposed to be Thorley's key, but I knew where he kept it Call me a beast if you like, but don't laugh at me.

"Dr. Fell and I unlocked the vault. After we'd—we'd attended to something inside, we shut it up again and locked it Then Dr. Fell was to do what I'd asked him. He was to seal up the lock, with modeling clay pressed through the keyhole until it was filled. He was to stamp that clay with some private seal or mark of his own, so he'd know it Then ..."

"Go on, Celia."

"Then," answered Celia, "he was to go away, with both the key and the seal, and not speak about it until I wrote to him. And that’ s what he did."

Abruptly Celia turned away, stamping her foot on the ground.

"I can't think now what made me do it," she said. "I must have been distracted. Anyway, that's what we did." "But why did you do it?"

"Because of what happened in the Long Gallery," said Celia, "on the night after Margot died." Still she would not look at him.

But, as though needing someone near her, she sat down beside Dr. Fell. Surprisingly, Celia did not seem at all frightened. She looked merely resolute, her chin up and a fixity of conviction in her eyes. She was just inside the shadow of the right-hand cypress: sideways to the vault, in the little crooked path of pebbles, and perhaps twenty feet from its door.

"It started as a dream," Celia said. "I knew that, as you always do, and I admit it

"It was Christmas Eve, remember, though not exactly the sort of Christmas we had planned. Margot was dead, and she had committed suicide, and before our generation that was thought to be a fearful sin. And I was in bed, asleep, on Christmas Eve.

"I dreamed I was in the Long Gallery, standing on the lowest step down from the Blue Drawing Room, looking straight along the gallery from the north end. It was all dark, except for bright starlight. Then I realized, in my dream, that there was not a stick or shred of furniture in the gallery. On my right ran the bare wall where the portraits ought to have been. On my left was the wall with the three oriel windows, and the stars outside.

"I wondered, with that sense of being m both the present and the past at once, whether the gallery had been cleared for the old Christmas dances and games. And then, far away from me, by the third oriel window, I saw half of a white face.

' "It was the side half, with the eye wide open. I saw a curve of hair out to the cheekbone, and a high uniform collar, and part of a red coat. And I thought: Why, that's the portrait of Lieutenant General Devereux, who died at Waterloo! "And then . ...”

"Something gave me a shock and a start, with a gasp in it, and a sensation of cold all over. Then I realized I was awake. Dazed and frightened, but awake.

"I was in the Long Gallery. I was standing on that lowest step, in blackness and starlight, after all. It was bitterly cold, because I had nothing on but my nightgown. I could feel the rough carpet of the step under my feet, and my heart beating to suffocation. I reached out and touched the side of the arch around the stairs. It was real.

"Then I looked down the gallery again.

"And the real house, all quiet and shadowy, it was looking at me. Something seemed to close up my throat, like fingers, when I saw that. I looked again, and it wasn't alone. There were others standing near it. They were the faces and figures that should have been in the portraits, but with one difference.

"The first horror was that they were all hatefully angry. I could feel that anger flowing toward me: dumb, dull, passive, yet still an anger. It filled the gallery with hatred. That was when, very slowly, they began moving toward me. The next horror was that, as they approached, I could see how each one of them had died.

"Those who died peaceful deaths had their eyes closed, like great dumb images. Those who died violent deaths had their eyes wide open, with a ring of white round the iris. I saw Madame Rambouillet with her wired ringlets, all bloated from dropsy; and Justin Devereux, in a starched ruff, with the dagger wound in his side.

"They were real. They had bodies. They could touch you. Past one window they came, and then another window, throwing shadows. But still I couldn't move. It was when the wave of them seemed to get higher and higher, and I could catch the gleam of a silver shoe buckle, I knew that their anger was not directed toward me at all. It was directed toward someone, a woman, crouching and cowering behind me, trying to shield herself.

"And all the time these dead things were speaking together, or whispering. First dry and rustling, then hatefully muffled like voices through cloth; but louder and louder, over and over, dinning and repeating, the same whispery three words. General Devereux, with the two bullet holes in his face, reached out and took my wrist to push me aside.

"And all the time those voices, paying no attention to me, went on with their refrain:

" 'Cast her out! Cast her out! Cast her out! "

CHAPTER XII

Celia's voice rose up wildly on those last words, and then trailed away. She sat there, just inside shadow, so that Holden could not read her expression. Her laughter, clear and ringing, rose up in the grass-scented churchyard.

"Stop that!" Holden said sharply.

"Stop what?"

"Stop laughingl"

"I'm s-sorry. But aren't you glad, Don, I didn't tell you this story last night?"

"What—happened after that? In the gallery?"

"I don't know. Obey found me lying there at daybreak on Christmas morning. She swore I'd die of pneumonia, and raved, and tried to pack me into bed with three or four hot-water bottles. But it didn't trouble me. I'm not sensitive to cold, as poor Margot was."

(At her side Dr. Fell made a short, slight movement)

“Celia." Holden cleared his throat

"Yes, Don?"

"You know, of course, that you dreamed all this?"

"Did I?" asked Celia. She edged sideways into the moonlight. The extraordinary glitter of her eyes, the set of her mouth, contrasted with the soft face. "They were real. They had bodies. I saw them."

"Do you remember last night, Celia? Dr. Shepton? I'd hate to agree with one single word Shepton said . . ."

"I don't blame you for agreeing, Don." Celia turned her face away. "If s only natural. I'm ma—"

"No. It was a quite ordinary nightmare. I've had some myself that were as bad or worse." (Lord, he prayed, let me handle this properly I) "But it was inspired, as Shepton suggested, by that thrice-damnable Murder game in masks."

"Don! Pleasel"

"You're intelligent, Celia. Use your wits on this. The very faces in your nightmare suggest masks. Now think of the voices, 'muffled like voices through cloth.' My darling, listen! Thaf s exactly how voices sound when they speak inside masks, as you heard them all through the questioning of the Murder game."

"Don, I ..."

"Let me appeal to Dr. Fell. What do you say, Dr. Fell?" "I say," replied Dr. Fell, in a slow and ponderous voice, "that we had better settle this." "Settle it?"

"By opening the vault now," said Dr. Fell. One of his canes fell to the ground with a clatter as he hoisted himself up on the other.

"But what in Satan's name do you expect to . . . ?"

"I was supposed," Dr. Fell swept this aside, "to wait for Inspector Crawford. He phoned that he was on his way, which was the message conveyed to me by Miss Obey. But (hurrum) he is very late. I think we shall proceed without him."

A new voice interposed:

"Just a minute, sir." They all jumped, and it seemed to Holden that Dr. Fell muttered something under his breath.

Up the pebbled path came tramping, rather out of breath, a hardy middle-aged man in old tweeds and a soft hat. The only feature of him now distinguishable was a remarkable moustache, which by daylight might have been anything from sandy to red. But he did not like this churchyard. He did not like it at all.

The newcomer gave Dr. Fell something between a touch of the hat and a formal salute.

"Had a puncture on my bike," he said. "Delayed. Sorry." Then he drew himself up. "What I want to know, sir, is this. Am I here officially, or unofficially?"

"At the moment," said Dr. Fell, "unofficially."

"Ah!" A breath of relief was expelled under the formidable ios moustache. "Mind, not that we're doing anything exactly illegal. But I thought I'd better wear plain clothes."

Dr. Fell introduced his companions to Inspector Crawford of the Wiltshire County Constabulary.

"Have you," asked Dr. Fell, "got the necessaries?"

"Torch, knife, and magnifying glass," returned Inspector Crawford, slapping two pockets briskly. "All present and correct, sir." But definitely he did not like his surroundings. They saw his eyes move.

"In that case," said Dr. Fell, "will you please examine what I have here?"

Fumbling inside his cloak, fiercely concentrating to remember the right pockets, Dr. Fell produced first an electric torch and then a small wash-leather bag tied at the mouth with a cord. He handed the bag to Inspector Crawford.

By the light of Dr. Fell's torch, a small dazzle under cypress shadow and the loom of the vault behind them, Crawford opened the bag and turned out in his palm a heavy gold ring whose seal Holden could not see; it was turned the other way.

"Well Inspector?" demanded Dr. Fell.

"Well, sir, if s a ring." The other peered at it more closely. "Bit of an odd seal. More intricate, like, than I ever saw. And this thing on the lower part, like a woman asleep ..."

"Intricatel" roared Dr. Fell. "Saints and devils!" They all shied back.

"Easy, sir!" muttered Inspector Crawford. His moustache, in the light, was fiery red.

"I beg your pardon," also muttered Dr. Fell, guiltily hunching his chins down into his cloak. "But I would, at Christmas, be visiting a noted collector. I would, with graceful presence of mind, drop that infernal ring into my pocket and forget it completely. I would have it in my pocket when— never mind!"

Again he pointed with the light from the torch.

"The ring, Inspector, was cut for Prince Metternich of Austria. You may take my word for it, or Professor Westbury's, that there isn't another like it in existence."

"Ah!" said Inspector Crawford.

"It was designed, during the days of Metternich's Black Cabinet, so that the impression of the seal couldn't be copied or forged or replaced once it had been stamped on a soft surface. For reasons I needn't go into now, you may take replacement as out of the question."

Dr. Fell now sent the beam of the torch wheeling round to the vault between the cypresses.

"On December twenty-seventh. Inspector, I locked that door. I filled the lock with plasticine, the sort you buy at Woolworth's. I sealed it with the ring. This afternoon I convinced myself that the seal hadn't been touched or tampered with since. Will you go and convince yourself too?"

Inspector Crawford squared his shoulders.

"I'm a fingerprint man," he said. "This is my meat"

And, a little uncertainly, they all moved toward the tomb.

They could now see that the little pillars on each side of the door, instead of being stone like the rest of the vault, were of mottled marble. Against the heavy inner door, painted gray, the gray seal of the lock would have gone unnoticed by any visitor to the cemetery. While Dr. Fell held the light, Inspector Crawford stooped down, put the ring beside the seal with his left hand, and with his right hand held a magnifying glass over both.

Holden darted a glance at Celia.

Celia, her head slightly lowered, was breathing in short and quick gasps. Instinctively she reached out and found his arm; but she hardly seemed conscious she was doing so.

Silence.

For ten mortal minutes Inspector Crawford hunched there while he compared those seals, moving only to ease cramped muscles and never moving his head. A small pattern of night noises crept out: the scuttling of an animal in the grass. Once Celia broke the silence.

"Can't you . . . ?"

"Easy, miss! Mustn't rush this!"

Momentarily Dr. Fell's light swept around as the Inspector spoke. That expression in Celia's eyes, Holden thought: where had he seen it? It reminded him of something. Where had he seen it before? The light swung back again.

"Right you are, sir," declared Crawford, straightening up and abruptly moving back from the door as though he loathed it. "Thaf s the original seal. Take my oath!"

"Would you also take your oath," asked Dr. Fell "that this vault is solidly built?"

"Not much doubt that, sir," retorted Crawford, handing him back the ring and the wash-leather bag.

"You're quite sure?"

"I was up here once or twice," said Crawford, "when Bert Farmer was building it. Walls eighteen inch thick. Stone floor. No vents or windows."

"Then if anything has happened," said Dr. Fell "it must have been caused by persons or things inside?"

"Happened?" repeated Inspector Crawford,

"Yes."

"Come off it, sir!" said Crawford, with sudden loudness. "What could happen, among a lot of dead men?"

"Possibly nothing. Perhaps much. Cut the clay out of that lock and we'll see."

"Can't you hurry?" cried Celia.

"Easy, miss!"

The beams of two torches were now fixed on that door as Crawford went to work with a sharp knife.

Holden had to admit to himself, in honesty, that he was now more nervous than at any time in fifteen months. No, far longer than that! At the end of the war, theoretically, you could forget your impulse to dodge into the nearest doorway at sight of any policeman. With him the feeling had lasted much longer.

If only he could remember (his thoughts ran on while Crawford's knife scraped and scraped) where he had seen that expression on Celia's face, and what it meant! It was associated with some risky business. It was associated with ...

"I only hope the key will work," Crawford kept muttering. "I only hope the key will work, that’ s all I hope. This clay stuff sets hard. But if s a very big keyhole; ought to be a simple lock. Got the key, sir? Ah! Thanks. Steady."

There was the heavy, clean click of a new lock as the key turned.

"All right," grunted Dr. Fell. "The door swings inward. Shove her open!"

"Sir. Listen." Crawford's red moustache turned slightly. "Do you honest-to-God think something's going to come out of there?"

"No! no! Certainly not! Shove her open!" "Right you are, sir."

The door creaked and squealed. Celia deliberately turned her back.

Now the beams of two electric torches were directed inside. They remained steady for perhaps two seconds, which seemed two minutes. Slowly they bepn to move. Down, up, across . . .

Inspector Crawford uttered a ringing expletive which burst out in that quiet place. The hand which held his torch was quite steady. But he had his left shoulder pressed to the side of the doorway as though he were trying to push the wall in. The red moustache bristled as he turned his head toward Dr. Fell.

"Those coffins have been moved," he said. "They've been moved."

" 'Flung,'" said Dr. Fell, "would be a more descriptive word. Flung as though by hands of such abnormal power that. . . Inspector!"

"Yes, sir?"

"When I locked and sealed that door, there were four coffins in the tomb. One was that of Mrs. Thorley Marsh. The other three had been brought down from the old vault to," Dr. Fell cleared his throat, "to keep her company. They were resting on the floor, in two piles, one on top of the other, in the middle of the vault Now look at them!"

Celia, shivering, an utter stranger, still kept her back turned. Holden came forward and looked past the others' shoulders.

The vault was not large. It was as bare as a stone jug except for an empty little niche in each side wall. Set perhaps four steps below ground level, it gaped at the lights with an evil sight

One coffin, of nineteenth century design, stood grotesquely and coquettishly half upright propped there, against the rear wall. Another—of very new gleaming wood over its lead casing and its inner shell of wood, which could only be Margot’s—lay pressed lengthways close against the left-hand wall The third, an old one, had been flung around so that it lay sideways to the door. Only the fourth, the oldest and most malignant looking of all, rested quiet

"And now," said Dr. Fell, "look at the floor."

"It’s . . ."

"It is sand," said Dr. Fell, rounding his syllables hollowly. "A layer of fine white sand, spread on a stone floor and smoothed out in my presence, just before the tomb was sealed. Look man! Use your light!"

"I'm doing it sir."

"The coffins," said Dr. Fell "have been lifted and thrown about. The sand has been disturbed. But there is not a single footprint in that sand."

Their voices, speaking through the doorway, reverberated and were thrown back at them. Warm moist air breathed out of the vault. It had a sickening effect The propped, drunken-looking coffin against the back wall, Holden could have sworn, trembled as though precariously balanced.

"This ain't," declared Crawford, and corrected himself instantly, "this isn't possible!" He said it simply, as a reasonable man.

"Apparently not But there it is."

"You and the young lady," Crawford's eyes flashed round quickly, "did this locking up and sealing up?"

"Yes."

"Why did you do it, sir?"

"To see whether there might be any disturbance like this." "You mean," Crawford hesitated, "things that aren't alive?" "Yes."

"Somebody," declared Crawford, "has been up to jiggery-pokery in there!" "How?"

That one word, like a knockout blow, sufficed. Yet Crawford, after a long pause, recovered doggedly. His keen eyes, over the bristling moustache, grew almost pleading.

"Dr. Fell, you're not fooling me?"

"On my word of honor, I have told you the literal truth."

"But sir, do you know anything about how modern coffins are built? Do you know how much they weigh?"

"I have never," said Dr. Fell, "actually occupied one."

"There's something funny about you," Crawford studied him, the eyes moving. 'You look... by George," he pounced on it "you look actually relieved/ Why, sir? Did you expect something worse than this to happen?"

"Perhaps I did."

Crawford shook his head violently, like a man coming up from under water.

"Besides," he argued, "what’s it got to do with you-know-what?" His glance was significant "It's no concern of ours, I mean the police's, if coffins start dancing about in their tombs. That's God Almighty's concern. Or the devil's. But it's not ours."

"True."

"The superintendent," persisted Crawford, "tells me I'm to take orders from you. He tells me a little about this murdering swine who's been—" Here the Inspector's professional caution stopped him. "Anyway, he tells me something about what you've got up your sleeve. We're after evidence. But look therel"

Straightening up, Crawford thrust his arm deep through the doorway. He sent the beam of the torch slowly playing over the grotesquely sprawled coffins and the sand.

"They're deaden," he went on. "Deaden are no good to us, unless it’s for a post-mortem. And that chap," the light fastened on the most malignant-looking coffin, a sixteenth-century one of decaying scrollwork, "that chap looks as though he'd be a good bit past any post-mortem.

"He was Justin Devereux," said Dr. Fell. "He died, in a sword-and-dagger duel at Barne Elms, more than three hundred yean before you were born."

A physical chill, like the damp breath out of that tomb, seemed to touch their hearts again.

"Did he?" asked Inspector Crawford. "He won't fight any more duels: that’ s certain. And that’ s what I mean. What am I doing here? Why did the super want me to come here? There's no—"

Suddenly Crawford stopped, drawing in his breath. His whole voice and manner changed. "Look there, sir!"

"What is it?" Dr. Fell spoke sharply.

"I didn't see it before, because I was concentrating on the floor. But look over there! In that left-hand niche in the wall!"

Lying in the niche, dusty and dirty but sending back gleams under the Inspector's torch, was a small brown bottle. It was rounded in shape; it would contain about two ounces. They could just see the edge of a label inscribed in colors. And it was still corked.

"I may not have heard much about this case," Inspector Crawford said grimly, "but I know what that is."

CHAPTER XIII

Holden turned round to find Celia.

She was now facing the tomb, but well back and to one side; she would not look into it All that sense of strangeness had gone.

"Celia dear ..."

"Can yon call me that?" asked Celia in a husky voice. "Can you even care anything at all about me? After tonight?"

"What in the world are you talking about?"

"I'm a beast," muttered Celia. "Oh, I am a beast!"

"Don't talk nonsense!" He took her shoulders and, in the dense shadow of the cypress, he kissed her. It was the same, the same as last night; nothing had changed. "But don't stay here!" he said. "Don't watch this. Go back to the house. It’ll only be bad for you if you stay."

"No!" urged Celia. "No. Please. Don't send me away. I have a reason. I—want to look in there now. I have a reason."

Both of them, then, became aware of an ominous silence.

Inspector Crawford and Dr. Fell still stood motionless on either side of the tomb door. Dr. Fell had stepped back, switching off his torch. The Inspector, though he still held the light steadily inside, stared at Dr. Fell with hard intensity. It was as though, curiously, they were duelists.

"Orders, sir?"

"Oh, ah!" Dr. Fell woke np with a snort and gurgle, returning the other's hard stare. "Yes. You'd better go in and fetch the bottle. Or," Dr. Fell added with sudden inexplicable ferocity, "are you afraid of the man who'll never fight another duel?"

"No, sir," returned Crawford with dignity.

"Please go and get it, then."

Celia and Holden watched him.

It was far from a pleasant job for Crawford. Once he had gone gingerly down those few steps, he seemed to feel he was outside the protected circle. He was exposed. He was in an arena, among ranged monsters.

Yet, as his own shoes made clear sharp-printed tracks in the thin layer of sand, he conscientiously stopped to note the fact. His light bobbed and flashed eerily. The beam of Dr. Fell's torch followed him. Searching for other tracks, finding none, Crawford moved toward the left-hand wall. There, in a niche some five feet above the new-gleaming coffin lying flat against the wall, was the brown bottle.

"Keep your light on me, sir." Crawford's voice boomed out of the vault. "I've got to shove my own torch into my pocket when I pick the thing up. Might be fingerprints. Better use two hands, or I may mess it up."

"All right. Steady!"

With his own light out, and only that yellow eye watching him from the door, Crawford nearly lost his nerve. Stretching up his hands, he pressed one hand over the top

"I say," he remarked. "Has anybody mentioned (anywhere?) that in the playroom at Caswall there's a toy printing press with three different kinds of colored type?"

"There certainly is," answered Celia. "Though how you knew that is more than I can think. But, Dr. Felll Please listenl What I wanted to ask you . . ."

"Does Thorley Marsh know about this printing press?"

"Yes! But..."

"Might I (harrumph) perhaps see it?"

"At any time you like. But, Dr. Fell! Please! You don't mean," Celia reached out and would have touched the bottle if Crawford had not stopped her, "you don't mean that’s really it? The—real thing?"

The sheer bewilderment in her voice, the amazement which had been growing for some time, made the others stare.

"Lord, miss," exclaimed Crawford, "what did you expect?"

Celia was taken aback. "I . .."

"As I understand it, miss, you're the one who's been chasing this bottle. Then, when we find it, you sound as flabbergasted as though it had never existed. What did you expect?"

"I don't know. I spoke stupidly. Please forgive me."

"Inspector," gabbled Dr. Fell with fiery intensity, "the bit of luck here is that the cork is still in the bottle. Even if the stuff was in solution, if s possible traces will remain. Have you got access to a pathologist?"

"In Chippenham?" Crawford's tone rebuked him. "Best in England."

Calling on heaven for a notebook and a pencil, which he possessed himself but couldn't find, Dr. Fell was supplied by Holden with these articles. While Crawford held a light, Dr. Fell wrote two words on a sheet, tore it out, and handed it to the Inspector.

"Now!" he went on excitedly, stuffing Holden's notebook into his own pocket. "Get your pathologist to test for those two ingredients. The first in large quantity, the second in small. If . . ."

Crawford was frowning at the paper.

"But these, sir, are two very well-known poisons! Taken together, would they produce that effect on the poor lady?"

'Yes."

"Dr. Fell," interposed Holden, who could stand it no longer, "what are these infernal poisons? We've heard a lot about them, but nobody's said a word as to the name. I'm

fairly well up in such matters myself. What did Margot die of?"

"My dear boy," answered Dr. Fell, rubbing his forehead blankly, "there's nothing mysterious about it. Ifs quite simple. Ifs not a new dodge. The poison . . ."

"Listen!" interrupted Crawford. "Out with that light!"

Darkness and moonlight descended.

"There's somebody talking down by the church," whispered Crawford.

"Attend to me!" muttered Dr. Fell. His hand descended heavily on Holden's shoulder. "We must not be interrupted now. And they've got as much right here as we have. Go down and shoo 'em away. Spin any yarn you like; but get rid of 'em. Don't argue! Go!"

Holden went.

Just when he seemed closer to Celia than ever before, just when a glimmer of understanding was about to appear in this business, he was tom away.

But was it a glimmer of understanding?

Moving quickly and softly on the grass margin beside the pebbled path, through the maze of graves and trees, he faced what had to be faced. Inside a stone box, with no entrance except a door whose seal had not been tampered with, someone had executed a danse macabre among the coffins yet had left not a footprint in the sand.

The effect not merely puzzled; it stunned. It seemed to leave no loophole. That this was supernatural, supposing such forces to exist, Holden could not believe even when the spell of it was on his wits. Supernatural forces, presumably, do not concern themselves with poison bottles.

Yet how? It was . . .

Recognizing the two voices which were talking beside the church, he stopped softly at the line of beech trees.

In the path beside the church—just as he and Celia had stood in that unforgotten time; just as unhappy as he and Celia had been—stood Doris Locke and Ronnie Merrick.

They stood wide apart, as he and Celia had done. Moonlight filtered down on them through the leaves. Behind them loomed the church wall with its painted windows drained of color. Both had a tendency to stare at the ground and scuffle shoes.

". . . and that," Doris was just concluding a rapid recital, "is everything that's happened tonight I had to tell somebody or burst"

Thanks very much for telling me," said Ronnie with powerful Byronic gloom. He kicked at a pebble in the path. Doris stiffened.

"Oh, not at all," she assured him airily. "Anyone would have suited just as well. What have you been doing?" "Sitting on the roof of the church." "What’s that?"

"Sitting on the roof of the church."

"How very silly of you," said Doris. "Whatever were you doing that for?"

"Perspective. There's always a proper angle to see a thing from. You wouldn't understand professional matters."

"Oh, wouldn't I?" asked Doris in a shivering kind of voice. "How we do give ourselves airs, don't we?" She checked herself. "Ronnie! Which side of the roof were you sitting on? This or the other?"

"The other. Towards Caswall. I thought," said the young man, looking up at the sky with a white face and dark hair falling back from his forehead, "of throwing myself off and killing myself. Only it's not high enough. I've jumped off the damn church too many times.—Why do you want to know?"

"Ronnie, there's something funny going on here tonight!"

"How do you mean, funny?"

"That big fat man, with the stomach and the eyes, said something about an appointment and the sexton. Ronnie, don't you see?" Doris edged closer. "They're going to do a post-mortem on That Woman! Hadn't we better . . . ?"

Holden, who had been about to creep thankfully away in the belief that from these two there would be no interference, stopped dead. That did it! That unquestionably did it. Clearing his throat, he stepped out into the path between them.

"Sir!" exclaimed the young man.

"Don Dismallo!" cried Doris.

The rush of welcome in both their voices, the quickness with which they hurried toward him, touched his heart To them he was right. He fitted. He could be confided in. At any other time he would have welcomed them. But now, with the clock ticking relentlessly on and something happening up there at the tomb ...

"Doris," he said, "where's your father?"

"Father," returned Doris, "has gone on home. We took a short cut through here, and met Ronnie. Father said he thought I'd much prefer to walk home with Ronnie, and

hurried on." Her voice shivered with disgust "I thought it was so crude of him."

"Crude!" said Ronnie. 'Your father! 'Crude.' Oh, save us!"

But for once Doris would not be diverted.

"Don Dismallo, there is something funny going on, isn't there?"

"Look here," said Holden, "I won't lie to you and say there isn't But I want you both to go on home." (Mutiny impending!) "I'll walk part of the way with you, if you like. I have something very serious to say to you both."

He hadn't All his thoughts were concentrated on Celia, and on coffins in the sand. But what he did was the only thing to do.

"Oh," murmured Doris. "We-ell! In that case"

In sudden and rather furtive silence, with Holden between the two like an itinerant wall, they walked down the path. Southward the drive which led to the church curved back to the main road. By crossing the meadows to the main road again, they could cut off much of the distance to Widestairs.

Soil in silence they tramped, through dew-wet meadow grass. It seemed to Holden that he could hear their hearts beating.

"Doris," he began, "you intimated early this evening that you were going to make the fur fly. And I must say you kept your promise.

"I did, didn't I?" asked Doris, between fear and complacence. "Thorley and I had been meaning to get married, sooner or later, ever since we'd been . .. you know."

(Holden gave her a warning look.) But tonight" Doris gulped, "I sort of forced the issue."

'Tell me, Doris. What do you think of Thorley Marsh now?"

"I think he's wonderful."

"Ha, ha, ha," said Ronnie, and uttered a long peal of laughter like somebody imitating a ghoul in a radio play. He stopped and appealed to Holden.

I ask you, sir," he demanded, "if that's not a good one? From what Doris has been telling me, her fat boy friend first walloped his wife and then poisoned her. And she thinks he's wonderful."

"Don Dismallo," said Doris, "will you please tell that offensive person on your left to shut his mouth until I finish speaking?—And, anyway, he didn't"

"Ha, ha, ha," said Ronnie.

"Oi! Easyl Both of you! Come on, now."

The swishing tramp of feet resumed. What was happening now, back at the vault?

"I—I love him," declared Doris. "AH the same, I was a bit disappointed with him tonight."

"Why, Doris? (Quiet, Ronniel) Why?"

"Oh, not over the walloping business! Which he didn't do anyway." Doris's eyes gleamed. "I'd rather have admired him for that"

"Well," said Holden, "of course that's one way of looking at it."

"I shouldn't really mind being knocked about myself now and then. You," said Doris, sticking her head past Holden's shoulder to look at Ronnie, "you wouldn't have the nerve to wallop me, would you?"

"Don't you be too sure of that," said Ronnie, sticking his head over Holden's shoulder to look at Doris.

"Oi! Wait a minute!"

For this wasn't funny. Certainly not to either of them. In the voice of the youth in the sports coat, his face white and twitching, there was a new, dangerous note. Holden had heard it in men's voices before; it meant business.

"You were saying, Doris," he prompted, "that Thorley disappointed you tonight"

"Well! When everybody started questioning him, I expected him to wipe the floor with them. And he didn't. I expected him to be like that man in the film, the Wall Street broker who . . ."

"Film!" echoed Ronnie tragically. "I ask you, sir!"

"Easy, now!"

"You take her to a film," said Ronnie. "And in comes some basket who acts like the Wild Man of Borneo. And she sighs and says, 'How lovely.' In real life," added Ronnie, with contempt, "you'd just tell the servants to sling the basket out of the house."

"Listen to Lord Seagrave's son talking!" sneered Doris.

Now they were over the fence, into the main road. Farther and farther, close to Widestairs, while these two wrangled. The minutes were ticking by; anything might be happening at the vault Then, just as Holden thought he could decently get away, something Doris said rang a vivid warning bell in his mind.

"What infuriates me so much, you know, is that it's all That Woman's fault Ronnie!" "Uh?"

"You remember what I told you a long time ago? About the man that Margot Marsh was so mad about?"

"Dinstinguished-looking middle-aged bloke? The one Jane Faulton caught her with in that New Bond Street place?"

(What the devil was this?)

"Jane didn't see the man face to face," Doris said impatiently. "That’s why we don't know who he is. And yet," she pondered, "though I denied it like fury tonight for Thor-ley"s sake, I could sometimes swear Thorley knows who the man was, and for some reason just won't say."

"Well, what about the old geezer?"

'You find that man," Dons announced darkly, "and you'll find who poisoned her."

"Rubbishl"

"Is it?"

"If he was having an affair with her," Ronnie pointed out, "why should he want to bump her off? He'd be enjoying himself, wouldn't he?"

"She got on his nerves," said Doris, "so he killed her. Or maybe it was a married man, and she wanted to marry him and he didn't. So he poisoned her."

"Or maybe," retorted Ronnie with heavy sarcasm, "it was somebody in politics, who couldn't afford the scandal. Maybe it was Mr. Attlee."

"I tell you—!"

"Doris!" Holden interrupted softly, but in a tone that could not be mistaken. All three of them stopped in the road.

They had passed the vicarage, and passed the beginning of a tall yew hedge on the right. Ahead loomed the lights of Widestairs, shining against mellow red brick, with the sweep of semi-circular steps which gave the house its name.

"What's all this," asked Holden, "about Margot and 'the New Bond Street place?'" He had long ago begun to formulate a theory about Margot's death. "Don't you understand, Doris, that this may be important evidence? Don't you understand you may be quite right?"

"Oh, dear!" said Doris, appalled. Her reaction was instinctive. "You won't tell on me?"

"Naturally," answered Holden, recognizing the only point that worried her, "I won't say where the information came from."

"Don Dismallo!" She regarded him with a kind of pity. "Celia—Celia never notices anything. She doesn't even guess about Thorley and me. But hasn't she told you that a long time ago That Woman started going to a fortune teller in New Bond Street? And that’s where she started getting worked up?"

(Yes, Celia had. Visits to a fortune teller, followed by angry rows with Thorley.)

"A fortune teller," he said aloud. "A Madame Somebody-or-other."

"Madame Vanya, 56b New Bond Street Only there wasn't any Madame Vanya, you see. It was all a gag." "I beg your pardon?"

"A gag, Don Dismallo! A hoobus-goobus!" Doris stamped her foot. "That's where they met, to avoid scandal, in two rooms dressed up as a fortune-telling place. Nobody would suspect a kind of office. That's how, nowadays, you can—"

Here she glanced quickly at Ronnie, and stopped.

"I mean," Doris gulped, "that’s what I'm told. I don't know. From my own personal experience, that is."

"One last question, Doris." Seeing Ronnie's emotional state, Holden clamped a hand down firmly on the young man's shoulder. "You say you and Thorley—easy, Ronnie!— have always intended to get married?"

"Well ... I thought so." Sudden misery flooded Doris's eyes.

"And there's good reason to believe, from the evidence, that Margot was in love with this mysterious gentleman. Then why couldn't a compromise have been arranged? After all, divorce is hardly a scandal nowadays."

Doris was back in her fighting mood.

"Thorley felt," she said, "that he—he owed a duty to That Woman. I thought it was too chivalrous. I thought it was silly. But there it was. Anyway, she's dead now and it doesn't matter."

"Listen, Doris!"

"Y-yes?"

"I won't presume to advise you. But you might do worse," he shook Ronnie's shoulder, "than what your father wants you to do. In any case, you might think it over."

"Thanks, Don Dismallo. All I know," Doris said violently, "is that if the fortune-telling place in New Bond Street hasn't been taken over by somebody else—which it probably has— you'll find out who poisoned her!"

"How so?"

"That Woman," said Doris, "was the most awful and incessant diary writer I ever did know. She couldn't see a piece of paper without wanting to write soul confessions on it. Or else," added a wildly romancing Doris, "you'll find a chest full of poisons or something. And I hope you do!"

"If you'll excuse me now, Doris ..."

"Don Dismallo!" She was taken aback. "You can't leave now!"

"I'm sorry, Doris. I can't explain, but if s vitally important" "I tell you, silly," cried Doris, "you can't rush away like that! This is our house" "I know, but—"

"You've got to come in and have a drink or something. Look! There's father coming out of the front gate now. He's seen you. You're caught"

And he was.

At Widestairs they gave him a hearty if rather preoccupied welcome. (A grandfather clock in the main hall, where the Murder game had been played, pointed to twenty-five minutes past eleven.) They pressed on him sandwiches and a whisky and soda. (Twenty minutes to twelve.) Lady Locke, a slender handsome woman looking older than Holden remembered, chatted pleasantly under a wall of painted masks. (Two minutes to midnight.) Sir Danvers, explaining in a preoccupied way that he must be off to London tomorrow, displayed some new items in his collection of pictures. (Eighteen minutes past midnight)

"Good night!" they called at a quarter to one. And Holden, once away from the front door, ran like hell.

All the time he had been mechanically speaking, smiling, accepting, admiring, he had been fitting together the pieces of the puzzle. And he knew now how Margot had been poisoned.

He didn't know who killed her. But he knew how. It fitted together all the inconsistencies. It explained exactly how a murder plot had been devised to look at best like natural death, and at worst like suicide.

"Therefore—!” he said to himself.

He found the churchyard deserted, as he had expected. The iron door of the tomb (it gave him a momentary but bad fit of the creeps, as he thought of what lay inside) the iron door was again locked. He groped his way out of the churchyard, feeling that certain shapes were following him.

Even Caswall Moat House, as he saw when he raced across the fields, showed no light except a dim yellow glimmer through the tall windows of the great hall. He pushed open the front door. He found Obey, sitting by the fireplace in that big white-stone cavern, patiently waiting to lock up. Obey rose at him. "Mr. Don!"

He steadied himself, panting, to get his breath. "They've all gone, I suppose?" he asked through gasps. "Yes, Mr. Don. And Miss Celia and Mr. Thorley have gone to bed."

"But some other damned thing has happened, hasn't it? I can see by your face! What is it?" "Sir, if s Miss Celia." "What about her?"

"Miss Celia and that big stout gentleman, Dr. Fell, came back here about an hour ago . .."

"Was there a police inspector with them?"

"Police inspector?" exclaimed Obey, pressing her ample bosom. "Oh, no/"

'Yes? What happened?"

"First they went up to the old playroom. I knew I shouldn't 'a' followed 'em, Mr. Don, but I couldn't help it"

"Of course you couldn't, Obey. Go on."

"WelL then they went to what used to be Miss Margot’s and Mr. Thorley’s rooms. Mr. Thorley won't sleep in his old room now; not that I blame him. Anyway," Obey swallowed, "they started rummaging about in the rooms, mostly Miss Margot’s old sitting room. I couldn't hear what they were saying, because both doors was closed. But it seemed all quiet.

"And then," her voice rose, "just before the stout gentleman goes back to the Warrior's Arms in the village, he starts talking to her low and soft. And gentle, you'd have said. In the sitting room.

"All of a sudden the door to the passage opens. Miss Celia comes out as white as a sheet—I'm telling you!—with the stout gentleman looking not much less upset than she was. Miss Celia didn't even see me when I was standing there. She could hardly walk when she went to her room."

Again Obey swallowed hard, composing herself.

"But don't worry, Mr. Don," she added consolingly. "You just sleep well."

CHAPTER XTV

And it was Obey, too, whom he first saw when he opened his eyes on the morning of Friday, July twelfth.

They had put him in his old room, which he used to occupy at Caswall, at the southwest comer upstairs. Its giant Tudor bed, of carved oak with legs supporting a carved wooden canopy, would have suited Dr. Fell himself. First Holden became conscious of warmth, even though the strong sun was on the other side of the house; then a rattle, against his door, of dishes on a tray.

"I thought I'd better bring your breakfast up, Mr. Don," Obey panted apologetically. "It s past eleven. I didn't like to disturb you with tea."

Holden, irritated, sat up wild-eyed.

"No! Hang it! Look here!"

"Is anything wrong, Mr. Don?"

"You and Cook the only people to work the whole house, and you bring up breakfast! Why can't Thorley—?" He checked himself.

Obey carefully handed him the tray, which included two boiled eggs.

"If you only knew, Mr. Don," Obey said, "what a pleasure it is."

"Anyway, thanks. Is.." he shook his head to clear it, "is Miss Celia up and about yet?"

"No." Obey eyed the floor. "But the big stout gentleman is. He's—he's in that playroom. He says, please, would you go there and see him as soon as you have your breakfast and get dressed?"

Holden, though uneasy, had no real premonition of disaster. But in the playroom some half an hour afterward, with a bath and shave to cool his head, he encountered something more than that

The playroom, which he had some difficulty in finding, was on the same side of the house. It was hot and yet dusky, a long room with two tall but narrow windows in the long side facing west, and a fireplace between the windows. An old wire fire screen still guarded the rusty grate. The baseboards and lower parts of the walls were still scuffed and kicked except where two large wardrobes had once stood, filled with dolls and games, and the coconut matting was blackly worn.

Two large doll houses, with one or two of their occupants hanging in an intoxicated condition out of the windows, had been pushed away into one corner. In another comer stood a dappled rocking horse which still retained its tail. Yet over everything lay a film of dust, disturbed dust, which added to the dimness of the room.

Dr. Fell, who had discarded his hat and cloak, sat by the fireplace in an armchair once sacred to Obey. From one corner of the doctor's mouth hung a curved meerschaum pipe, long ago gone out He had got hold of a large rubber ball, once colored red, which with grave absorption he was bouncing on the floor.

He stopped bouncing the ball as Holden entered.

"Sir," said Dr. Fell, taking the pipe out of his mouth as well, "good morning."

"Good morning. I'm up a bit late, I'm afraid. And last night I was . . ."

"Delayed? So I understand."

Dr. Fell scowled very intently at the rubber ball.

"I, on the other hand," he went on, "performed the incredible feat of getting up at eight o'clock. I have gone to Widestairs. I have had interviews with several persons there." He looked up. "I have also had a report from the police."

That glance should have conveyed a warning across the hot, dusky room. But it didn't Holden was too absolutely, and properly, convinced of his own theory.

"Yes?" he inquired.

"You (harrumph) wish to lend all assistance in this unpleasant business?" '’Naturally!"

"Then would you be prepared," asked Dr. Fell, "to take a train for London leaving in about an hour? To go on another errand to an address I propose to give you?"

Another errand, eh?

For a moment his companion merely stared at him. Then rebellion, black and full of bile, rose in Donald Holden's soul.

"No, sir," he replied. "I am not prepared to do that." "Oh, ah," assented Dr. Fell, contemplating the rubber ball with a somewhat guilty air.

"But before I tell you why I won't, Dr. Fell, I wonder l whether I can guess the address where you want to send me? i Is it 'Madame Vanya, 56b New Bond Street?'"

Dr. Fell, who had been about to bounce the ball again, stopped short. He grew intent He raised his eyes, adjusting the lopsided eyeglasses.

"That’s good," he said. "In the speech of Somerset, it is clever-good. Have you anything else to tell me?"

"Well, sir," Holden's throat felt dry, "if you wouldn't mind returning the notebook you borrowed last night—?"

"Was that yours? My dear boy!" said Dr. Fell, in a huge burst of contrition which blew wide a film of ash from his pipe and sent an alarming crack through the framework of , the chair. "How extraordinary! I was wondering where and ! when I could have bought it One moment! Here you are. , And somebody's pencil."

"Thank you."

"But what—er—are you going to do?"

A pulse in Holden's temples thumped heavily. The heat ' and dust of the room pressed down. This was the test.

"Dr. Fell, I may be entirely wrong. But I'm going to adopt your own trick."

"Trick?"

"I'm going to write down, in two words, what I believe to be the key to the solution of Margot's murder." Holden scribbled the words, tore out the sheet, and handed it to Dr. Fell. "Will you tell me whether that’s right?"

There was a little space of silence while, he looked down ' at Dr. Fell in the old black-alpaca suit, and around at the wardrobes and the doll houses and the rocking horse. Dr. i Fell, who had put down pipe and ball to take the paper, sat . with his eyes closed.

"Sir," announced Dr. Fell, "I am an old fool." He lifted his hand, as though forestalling comment.

"You will say," he went on, "that this leaps to the eye and needs no emphasis. Yet in spite of hearing it for so many yean, especially from my wife and Superintendent Hadley, I never quite believed it until now. Archons of Athens! I should have trusted your intelligence!"

Fiery certainty came to Holden.

"Then that’s right, sir? What I wrote down?"

"So nearly right" said Dr. Fell, "as makes no difference. With one slight variation, which of course you will have deduced for yourself, a ringing bull's-eye."

Crumpling up the piece of paper, he flung it over the fire screen into the empty grate.

"I was an utter ass," groaned Dr. FeD, "to worry- about it at all! I should have known you wouldn't misunderstand—er —well! certain things that are open to misunderstanding. My boy, how you relieve my mind!

Holden smiled.

"Then you do appreciate my position, Dr. Fell? About not wanting to rush off to London? Dr. Fell looked at him blankly. "Hey?"

"My only concern in this affair," said Holden, "is Celia." "Exactly, exactly! But..."

"After a long time," said Holden, "I find her again. But no sooner do I try to see Celia, speak to her, have five minutes alone with her, than somebody tells me I can't possibly see her by doctor's orders. Or sends me haring off somewhere away from her, as you now want to send me to London.

"Well, I won't do it I'm damned if I will. I'm sick and tired of obeying orders, Service or otherwise. What I want to do is to sit down with Celia, and keep her near me where I can touch her, for hours and days and weeks and months on end. That's what I propose to do, and—"

He paused. Dr. Fell, mouth open, was regarding him with a face of dismay.

"God alive!" whispered Dr. Fell. "Then you don't understand!"

"Understand what?"

"You have the wit," said Dr. Fell, pointing toward the crumpled paper in the grate, "to work that out The difficult point doesn't escape you. Yet looming up, overshadowing everything, you don't see . . ."

"See what? What is an this?"

"My dear sir," Dr. Fell said gently. "Don't you see that in a few days the police will probably arrest Celia for murder?" Dead silence.

There is a phrase about the room seeming to swim around in front of someone's eyes, which is often derided. Yet, perhaps from the physical effect of the heat the closeness, the nerve strain of the past two days, something like that happened to Donald Holden now.

As though through blurred transparency, he saw the scuffed walls, the blackened matting, the fireplace with its biblical riles, the wardrobes and doll houses, move out or up from their places, waveringly dissolve in line, and settle back again., The glass eye of the rocking horse seemed alive. Yet the effect of Dr. Fell's statement was such as to keep Holden outwardly calm.

"That,'' he said, "is too nonsensical to be talked about"

"Is it, my dear sir? Think! Try to think!"

"I am thinking." (He lied.)

"Don't you see the strength of the case that can be built up against Celia?"

"There is no case against her."

"Sit down," said Dr. Fell in a heavily wheezing voice.

Beside the nearer of the doll houses there was an old chair. Putting away notebook and pencil—that brave notebook and pencil!—Holden brought back the chair and planted it across the hearth from Dr. Fell.

He found and lit a cigarette, with a steady hand, before sitting down.

"Just a moment!" he interposed, as Dr. Fell started to speak. "You don't believe—?"

"In Celia's guilt? No, no, no!" said Dr. FeD. "My belief is; the same as yours. And I think, if you use your wits, you; will see the face of the real murderer."

Here Dr. Fell hitched his chair forward, earnestly.

"But if s not a question," he went on, "of what I believe.; If s a question of what Hadley and Madden believe. That long; letter of hers, her conversation with you in the playground on Wednesday night (which was overheard), and above all. the events of last night, have played the very devil."

Holden took a deep draw at the cigarette.

"These gentlemen," he said calmly, "believe that Celia poisoned Margot?"

"They're inclined to. Yes."

"Then the charge is absurd on the face of it. Celia loved Margot"

"Exactly! Yes! Granted!"

"Well, then? Where's your motive?"

Dr. Fell spoke quietly, his eyes never leaving the stony face across from him.

"Celia," he said, "really believed her sister was being led, by Thorley Marsh, a life which no humane person could call fit enough for a dog. Celia believed this, and still believes it. You grant that?"

"Yes."

"Celia believed her sister to be the unhappiest mortal on earth. She believed Mrs. Marsh would never get a divorce, never get a separation, never go away. She believed that Mrs. Marsh sincerely and even passionately wished for death, as Mrs. Marsh told her. And so ..."

The cigarette shook slightly in Holden's fingers.

"Are you telling me," he said, "that these police supermen think Celia poisoned Margot out of a kind of mercy?'"

"I fear so."

"But an act like that would be sheer insanity!" "Yes," assented Dr. Fell quietly. "That is what they think it is." Pause.

"Now one moment!" Dr. Fell's big voice rang out with authority, an authority which kept his companion still. His eyes never left Holden's face. "I see precisely what is going on in that brain and heart of yours. Oh, ah! And I sympathize. But, if you lose your head now, we are done for.

"I tell you," added Dr. Fell, "that of legal evidence I have nothing, I have not that, to rebut the strong evidence of the other side. Unless you and I can get Celia Devereux out of this, there will be nobody to do it. We are (I trust?) rational men, sitting quietly in an old nursery among toys, and discussing rational evidence. Shall we consider that evidence?"

"Dr. Fell," Holden said huskily, "I beg your pardon. It won't happen again."

"Good! Excellent!" said Dr. Fell.

Yet the doctor, though he tried to seem cheerful, got out a red bandana handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

"First I ask you," he proceeded, "to look at this."

"What is it?"

"It is a list," answered Dr. Fell, fishing up a folded paper from beside him in the chair, "of the real-life murderers who were impersonated in the famous Murder game at Wide-stain on the night of December twenty-third. I have jotted them down chronologically, with dates and place of trial. Please glance at it."

Holden, trying to be very judicial, did so. Dr. Fell watched him steadily. The list of names read:

Maria Manning, housewife. (London, 1849.) Executed, with her husband, for the murder of Patrick O'Connor.

Kate Webster, maidservant. (London, 1879.) Executed for the murder of her employer, Mrs. Thomas.

Mary Pearcey, kept woman. (London, 1890.) Executed for the murder of a rival, Phoebe Hogg.

Robert Buchanan, physician. (New York, 1893.) Executed for the murder of his wife, Annie Buchanan.

G.J. Smith, professional bigamist (London, 1915.) Executed for the murder of three wives.

Henri Desire Landru, same as Smith. (Versailles, 1921.) Executed for the murder of ten women and one child.

Edith Thompson, cashier. (London, 1922.) Executed, with her lover Frederick Bywaters, for the murder of her husband, Percy Thompson.

"I say nothing of the list," continued Dr. Fell, "beyond expressing my belief that Mrs. Thompson was innocent and Mrs. Pearcey should have been sent to Broadmoor. But I call your attention to the first name on the list"

"Maria Manning," said Holden, drawing deeply at the cigarette. "That's the part Celia played in the game."

"Yes. And Celia," continued Dr. Fell, "loathes crime! Hates crime! Won't read a word about itl In fact, because of this well-known tendency she was amusedly tolerated by Sir Danvers Locke for her ignorance in the part of Maria Manning."

"Very well. What about it?"

'Yet, on going home that same night, she had a singularly vivid and horrible dream. You remember: she told you about it?"

"I remember something, yes."

"She dreamed she was standing on a platform in an open space, with a rope round her neck and a white bag over her head, high above a shouting jeering crowd of people who were singing her name to the tune of 'Oh, Susannah.' '

A jab of dread struck at Holden. He was looking round at the scuffed walls where Celia and Margot had played as children. But he said nothing.

"The dream," said Dr. Fell, "described sober truth. In 1849, you see, that tune was a popular song hit. And the mob sang it, with the substitution of the words, 'Oh, Mrs. Manning,' all night long before the woman's execution on the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol."

Again Dr. Fell mopped his forehead.

"Now this detail," he went on, "is far from being well known. Charles Dickens mentioned it in a letter to the Times, protesting against the foulness and indignity of public executions. But it is an obscure detail. Anyone who knows it..."

"Is well read in crime?"

"Yes. And is at least fascinated—morbidly so, the police think—by the whole subject" Holden tried to laugh.

'Tuppenny-ha'penny evidence," he said. "Celia might have learned that detail anywhere! From one of the other people at the game! And quite naturally dreamed about it!"

"That" agreed Dr. FelL "is quite true. But it is the sort of thing, don't you see, that rouses suspicion? What really interested Hadley was her insistence, in the letter, that important evidence would be discovered when she and I unsealed the vault on the night of the eleventh of July.

"Now mark the dates involved! Just after Christmas, at Celia Devereux's impassioned plea, she and I went through that ritual of spreading sand on the floor, locking the door, and sealing it. I went away entrusted with the key and the seal.

"Afterward, for more than six months, nothing! Not a word from her! Then, out of the blue, she writes to me and asks if I will redeem my promise to unseal the tomb. At the same time she writes to the police. What’s up? Why has she waited as long as that? What does she expect to happen? Archons of Athens! Can you wonder, at least that some curiosity was roused?"

"No. I don't wonder."

"And now," said Dr. Fell, "I'm afraid I have some rather bad news for you." "All right Let’s have it"

Replacing the bandana handkerchief in his pocket Dr. Fell took out a little wash-leather bag which was only too familiar. He opened it and spilled out on his palm the big gold ring with the seal.

"The sleeping sphinx!" he said.

"What’s that?"

"The lower part of this design," Dr. Fell scowled at it, "which Crawford described as being 'like a woman asleep.' In occult lore, it has—er—a meaning which is strongly applicable to this case. It is—harrumph—interesting. Yes. I could lecture on it: dignus, I hope, vindice nodus. It.. ."

"Dr. Fell, you're evading the point You're floundering like an old woman! What is this bad news? Let’s have it!"

His companion looked up.

"I told you," Dr. Fell said, "that I had been in touch with the police this morning?" "Yes?"

"Dregs contained in that bottle we found in the vault" said Dr. Fell, "have been analyzed. Madden has applied to the Home Office for authority to exhume Mrs. Marsh's body and hold a post-mortem."

"All right! What about it? How does it affect Celia? If our theory is correct—"

Dr. Fell lifted his hand.

"Celia's fingerprints, and Celia's alone," he said, "have been found on that poison bottle."

After a pause he added;

"There is no doubt, even in my own mind, that she deliberately put it there for us to find."

CHAPTER XV

As you say," observed Holden, depositing his cigarette in the grate with a steady hand, "we are rational men discussing rational evidence. But this has gone beyond the rational. Celia put that poison bottle in the tomb?"

"Yes."

Both of them kept their voices studiously level.

"Celia also, I suppose, managed to get in and out of a sealed vault? And hurled coffins about the place as though they were tennis balls?"

"No," returned Dr. Fell, rounding the syllable, "She had nothing to do with that. It is what I wish to emphasize. She had nothing to do with that. Yet she was expecting it"

"Expecting it?"

"I will go further, sir. She was gambling on it."

Dr. Fell threw up the big gold ring, and caught it against his palm. And Holden remembered. He remembered the elusive memory he had been trying to place last night, of the expression on Celia's face as the tomb was being opened, and of what it reminded him.

Mainz am Rhein! Early in '44!

He and a certain Swiss woman had been standing by a dark window, in an ill-smelling city, just as the siren squalled an alert against British bombers. The woman was opening a little packet; it would contain, she thought, certain information which would gain her a reward from the British and get her smuggled oat of Germany to safety forever. She wasn't sure, but she thought so. She couldn't swear to it, but she was gambling on it .

As the air-raid siren squalled, a distant ack-ack battery cut loose prematurely. Pale-white light lifting in the sky, followed in a few seconds by the hollow shock of the guns, touched the Swiss woman's face. Her whole expression—the shallow breathing, the distended nostrils, the fixed and half-closed eyes—had been Celia's expression as Celia waited for the opening of the tomb.

Holden drew his thoughts back to the present to Dr. Fell throwing up and catching the big gold ring.

"If Celia put the bottle in the tomb," Holden asked, "when did she put it there?"

"Before the tomb was sealed."

"Oh?"

"Before the tomb was sealed," insisted Dr. Fell, "at a time when Celia and I, and only Celia and I, were present That niche was empty when we went in; I can swear to it I didn't see her do it I wasn't expecting anything of the sort But there were a dozen opportunities, in a semi dark place, while the sand was being put down. She was the only one who could have done it"

Holden swallowed. "And afterward ..." he began.

"Go on!" said Dr. Fell.

"Afterward," said Holden, "after the vault had been sealed, Celia expected somebody or something to get in there and do what was done?"

"Yes."

"Are yon plumping for a supernatural explanation?'' "Oh, no," said Dr. Fell.

"But look here! The utter impossibility of explaining how anybody got in and out of a sealed vault..."

"Oh, that?" exclaimed Dr. Fell in astonishment He sat up. He made a gesture of distressed contempt "My dear sir, that’ s the simplest part of the whole problem. I was expecting it before I got here."

Holden stared at him. Dr. Fell, with vast snorb'ngs and head shakings and a movement that made the whole chair creak and crack, was genuinely puzzled and concerned that this little point should have worried anyone.

"Fortunately for us, however," Dr. Fell added, "what we will call the Poltergeist Horror in the tomb has got Madden, Crawford, and Company completely floored. They think the poison bottle was put there at the same time as the coffins were disrupted, apparently by malignant ghosts. And they can't see how it happened.

"The trouble is, they won't stay floored. If s too simple. In a day or two at most, they'll see through it. Then the fat will be in the fire. And their case against Celia Devereux wfll be as follows:

"Celia poisoned her sister, using a drug whose principal ingredient was morphine—" "Morphine, eh?" said Holden.

"Yes. Which is virtually painless. Celia arranged the crime to look like suicide. For, mark you! Another strong reason for the suicide, which she believed Margot wished for, was to expose Thorley Marsh to the world as a sadistic villain. To show him up! To give him what he deserved!

"And that didn't happen.

"The family doctor said this was a natural death. Celia, crying out that it was suicide and that Mr. Marsh had driven his wife to it, was hastily shushed. Having disposed of the poison bottle, Celia couldn't produce it in any place it should have been: that is, within reach of Margot Marsh.

"So (we are still stating the police case) she determined to go further. Out of a half-crazed imagination she invented this tale of ghosts walking in the Long Gallery, crying against Margot Marsh as a suicide. 'Cast her out!' was what they cried. Cast her out, from sleep among the just or honest dead!

"Nobody would believe that. But she would force them to believe it. So Celia, with my unconscious connivance, slipped the poison bottle into the niche. She gambled—for certain reasons of her own—that there would be poltergeist disturbances there. Then the tomb would be opened. And it would seem, among flung coffins and the poison bottle, that the very dead had cried out against Margot and Thorley Marsh."

Dr. Fell paused, wheezing.

His color had been coming up in spite of himself. He put the sea] ring on his own finger and scowled at it. "But—oh, Bacchus!" he added. "You see what follows?" "I'm afraid I do."

"The police, once they've tumbled to the explanation of the intruder who throws coffins without leaving a footprint, will hardly view the matter as a supernatural occurrence. No, by thunder! Because . .."

"Because?"

Dr. Fell checked off the points.

"Who could have killed Mrs. Marsh, except the sister who had the poison bottle? Its very label was printed on a toy press," he pointed, "which you'll find in the wardrobe over there. Celia's fingerprints are on the bottle. She alone could have put it in the niche where it was found.

"And, heaven help me," added Dr. Fell "I shall have to testify as much."

There was a long silence.

Holden pushed back his chair and got up. His legs felt light and shaky; heat pressed as oppressively as a cap on the brain. He began to walk about the room: blindly, not seeing it It was all very well for Dr. Fell to talk about keeping your head, but this was bad. This was about as bad as it could be. It fitted in too well with so many things Celia had said and done.

"I do not ask," Dr. Fell observed politely, "what you think of the case against Celia. But you at least perceive we have got a case to answer?"

"My God, yes!—Can you answer it?"

Dr. Fell clenched his fist and scowled at the seal ring on his finger.

"I can answer it," he retorted. "Oh, ah! I can answer it in the sense of replying, 'Sir, thus and thus I believe to be true.' Especially since I put the cards on the table with Celia last night."

"That was what upset her so much?"

"It did, rather. But after you had left us, and Inspector Crawford so very obviously got a set of her fingerprints by handing her a silver cigarette case, it seemed better to warn her of the danger."

"What did Celia say?"

"Very little, confound it! Enough to make me sure I was right All the same . . ." Dr. Fell hammered his fist on the chair arm. "No!" he added. "No, no, no! We are not going to mess about by trying to prove a negative. We establish a positive or die in the attempt."

"If we had any idea of who the murderer actually is—!"

"I know who it is," Dr. Fell said simply. "I've been certain ever since I questioned Thorley Marsh in the Long Gallery last night"

Holden, who had been looking blankly out of the nearer window toward the distant churchyard, whipped round.

"And now," inquired Dr. Fell, "will you go on that errand for me?"

"To the address in New Bond Street?"

"Yes. I can't send a police officer. My views (hurrum!) differ from those of authority. I must withdraw my evil skirts from the case. Will you go?"

"Certainly. But what do you expect to find there? And, as Doris Locke said . . ."

Dr. Fell spoke sharply.

"Doris Locke? What has Doris Locke got to do with it?"

"She was the person who gave me the address." Holden narrated the incident, while Dr. Fell's eyes grew rounder and rounder behind the lopsided glasses.

"How very interesting'" he said in a hollow voice, and puffed out his cheeks. "How very interesting that it should be the woman's intuition of Doris Locke to light on so much. Harrumph, yes."

"All the same, Margot has been dead for more than six months. By this time those fortune-telling premises have been taken over by somebody else!"

"On the contrary." Dr. Fell shook his head. "I have reason to think the place is still intact. And that vital evidence may be there. I would go myself. But I must remain here, I tell you I must remain here, to find out whether anyone has discovered the real secret of the tomb."

"Yes," Holden cried out bitterly, "and that’ s just it!"

"What is?"

"That infernal vault! Look at it!"

And he pointed out of the window, though Dr. Fell was not in a position to see.

Just ahead of and beneath him, as he looked out from the northwestern side, Holden could look out over the quadrangle of stables and bakehouses and brewhouses: the diamond-paned windows that were dusty yet fiery, the cobblestoned court where pigeons fluttered, the gilt hands of the stable clock. Beyond yellow-green meadows, in Caswall churchyard, he could even pick out the tomb between the cypresses. Aside from the old vault on the hill, it was the only one there.

Holden clenched his fists.

"Ifs got into my head," he declared. "It may be simple to you. But ifs got into my head. It muddles up every attempt to think. Something got through a sealed door, and threw the coffins about without leaving a footprint in sand. In Satan's name, what was it? Will you tell me?"

For a long time Dr. Fell regarded him somberly.

"No," answered Dr. Fell, "I will not And there are two reasons why I will not."

"Oh?"

"The first reason," said Dr. Fell, "is that you must start your wits working again, or you will be of no use to us. I propose (by thunder, I do!) that you shall start them working by solving that little problem for yourself. And, if you like, I will give yon one very broad hint"

Here Dr. Fell closed his eyes briefly.

"Do you remember," he asked, "the moment when the tomb door was opened?"

"Very vividly."

"The lower hinge, if you recall, squeaked and rasped as it opened?"

"I seem to remember the noise, yes."

"Yet the lock, when Crawford turned that key, opened with a sharp, clean click?'

"Then there was some crooked work about that lock! Crawford was right! There was some ... I don't know! The seal had been tampered with."

"Oh, no," said Dr. Fell. "It was the original, untouched seal."

And he blinked at the seal ring on his finger.

"That," he went on in the same heavy tone, "is my hint. Now for my second reason for not telling you. You are not really thinking about that tomb at all."

"What the devil do you mean? I'm—"

"Only with the surface of your mind!" said Dr. Fell. "Only as an excuse! Only to avoid thinking about something else! Shall I read your mind?"

The sun, past its meridian now, was striking into these windows. Holden did not reply.

'You were thinking about Celia Devereux."

Holden made a fierce gesture as the other went on.

'You were thinking: 'I know she's not guilty of murder; I know she didn't poison Margot; but is she mad?'"

"God help me. I.. ."

" 'How to reconcile,' you were thinking, How to reconcile with the facts Celia's insistence that Margot desired death, that Margot once swallowed strychnine, that Thorley Marsh's brutality drove her to it? How to reconcile with the facts Celia's behavior now, and her story about the ghosts in the Long Gallery?' Have I read your mind correctly?"

Holden, who had lifted his fists, dropped them at his sides.

"Look here," he said. "I'm going in now and have it out with Celia."

Dr. Fell did not try to prevent him.

'Yes," Dr. Fell assented. "That would probably be best. And I tell you again: that girl is no more mad than you are. But I warn you ..."

The other, who had started for the door, stopped short.

"A part of the police's case against her," returned. Dr. Fell, "is damning because it is perfectly true. On one point, and one point alone, that girl has been telling lies. That has caused a good deal of the trouble. She loathes telling lies in front of you."

"I’ll see her! I’ll . . ."

"Very well. But—what time is it now?"

Holden craned his neck to see the stable clock.

"A few minutes past twelve. Why?"

"You have just ten minutes," said Dr. Fell, "before you need leave here to catch that train."

The door to the passage opened. It was not flung open, since Mr. Derek Hurst-Gore caught it before it could strike the wall. Mr. Hurst-Gore, in his fine gray suit, his tawny hair agitated like his affable countenance, stood in the doorway looking from one to the other of them.

"Er—forgive this intrusion," he began. "But I heard voices. I could find nobody in the house." He took a few steps into the room, trying to smile and failing. "Dr. Fell! Have you heard this report that the police have applied for an order to exhume Margot's body?"

"I have."

"But why didn't you prevent it?"

Dr. Fell reared back; even in the chair he towered demonically. "Prevent it, sir?"

"You're a great husher-up," said Mr. Hurst-Gore, spreading out his hands. "I've heard how you hushed up everything in the case where the high-court judge was involved, and that business in Scotland at the beginning of the war. I —I was counting on you as a husher-up! Besides," he complained, "if s nonsense!"

"What is nonsense?"

"This! All this. I know the facts." Mr. Hurst-Gore's small, shrewd eyes grew hard and steady. "Dr. Fell, where's Thorley Marsh?"

"Hey?"

"Where's Thorley Marsh?"

"When I last saw him, sir, he was at Widestairs deep in conversation with Doris Locke. Isn't he still there?" "Oh, no," replied Mr. Hurst-Gore, shaking his head. "He's gone tearing off to London in his car. Where's he gone, exactly?"

If Derek Hurst-Gore had expected to produce an effect on Dr. Fell, he must have succeeded far beyond his hopes. Dr. Fell's mouth hung open. His eyes became fixed and glazed. It is not possible for a man of his complexion to become pale, yet he showed an approach to it now.

"Oh, Lord!" whispered Dr. Fell. "I heard it. With my own ears I heard it. He looked at Holden. "You told me. Yet with my scatterbrain on other matters, I never thought of the possibility that—" His bandit’s moustache puffed in agitation. "My dear Holden! Listen! You have no time to lose. You must be sure of catching that train. Holden! Wait!"

But Holden was not listening. He was off in search of Celia.

The inner walls of those long galleries had windows which looked out over the center quadrangle, weedy and overgrown, of the cloisters where once nuns had walked. The bedroom doors, in this gallery, had outer doors of stuffed leather, edged with brass nailheads, to deaden sound. Holden threw open the leather door of Celia's room, knocked at the inner door, and opened it

In a small bedroom with an oriel window, Celia sat before the mirror of a Queen Anne dressing table in the window embrasure. She had just finished dressing, and she was brushing her hair. Their eyes met in the mirror.

Holden took the two steps down into the room, amid a beauty of furniture whose polished age and grace showed brown-dark against white walls. There were little woven rugs on the floor.

"Celia," he said, "have you been telling lies?"

"Yes," answered Celia quietly.

She put down the brush. She got up, turned round, and stood facing him with her back to the dressing table.

"I invented that whole story," not a syllable was blurred in the clear voice, "about what happened in the Long Gallery on Christmas Eve. Not a scrap of it is true, and I don't believe in ghosts myself. Please wait, before you say anything!"

Though the gray eyes remained steady, utter self-loathing colored Celia's cheeks. Her fingers touched the edges of the dressing table behind her, and gripped the edges. So intense was the silence that he could hear a ring on her finger scrape against the dressing table.

"I wanted to tell you," she went on, "in the playground on Wednesday night But I kept away from it because I was so ashamed. Then—Dr. Shepton got there, before I could tell you the truth. And you heard things from him.

"That's been between us, Don. I kept away from you on Thursday because I was ashamed. Then, when Dr. Fell broke down Thorley's story in front of the Lockes and absolutely smashed him to bits, I thought it didn't matter any longer and I could tell you. But immediately Dr. Fell said Thorley was all innocent and holy; things turned upside down again. So I said to myself: All right; I will go through with the business of opening the tomb."

He could see the rigidity of her shoulders, under a thin gray silk dress.

"When I told you people that ghost story, Don, I was acting. Every bit of it. Now hate me. Go on: hate me! I deserve it!"

Still, all about him, the silence seemed to make an island. "Why don't you speak, Don? Why do you just stand there and look at me? Don't you understand. I've been telling lies." "Thank God," said Holden.

He spoke so softly, in such a deep and heart-felt relief, that it hardly whispered across the dazzling sunlit space between them.

"What's... that?" Celia whispered back.

"I said, thank God."

Celia's knees shook. Her fingers relaxed on the edge of the dressing table. She sank down abruptly on the brocade-covered seat in front of the table, staring at him.

"You mean," she cried, "you don't care?"

"Care?" shouted Holden. "I never was so delighted with any news in all my born days." In a dizziness of relief, he addressed the ceiling oratorically.

"The Cimmerian night," he said, "o'ershadows us. Howling monsters in outer darkness rage. But Celia has been telling lies; the sun shines again; and all is gas and gaiters."

"Are you j-joking?"

"Yes! No! I don't know!"

In four strides he covered the distance between them.

"I knew," he told her, "that what you said wasn't true. I knew it in my heart But I was afraid you believed it yourself. So I was afraid it might be—something else. And now, glory be, I hear it's only . . ."

"Don! For heaven's sake! Don't hold me back over the dressing table! Mind the mirror! Mind the powder bowl! I mean—I don't care; hit 'em all over the place if you like. But. . ."

"But," he demanded, lifting her to her feet again, "Dr. Fell's told you what the police think of this?"

"Oh, the police?" said Celia, with weary indifference. "That doesn't matter. What does matter, don't you see, is that I can't ever look you in the face again?"

"Celia. Look at me now."

"I won't! I can't!"

"Celial"

Presently, after a considerable interval, he added:

"Now listen. Whether you like it or not, we have got to get you out of this. You did put that bottle there, before the vault was sealed? Just as Dr. Fell suggested?" "Yes."

"Why did you do it Celia?"

"To prove, replied Celia, writhing in self-disgust "that g-ghosts were denouncing Thorley for driving Margot to suicide. Because that’ s what Thorley did, Don! That’s true!" She broke off. "I know it was silly. I told you Wednesday night it was silly. But I was desperate. It was all I could think of."

"Where did you get the bottle?"

"Don, I had no idea it was the real bottle!"

"The strongest part of the case against you, Celia, and so far the unanswerable part, is that you alone could have been in possession of the poison bottle after Margot’s death."

"But I wasn't in possession of it I found it"

"You found it?"

"All those bottles look alike, don't they? Or, at least I thought they did. I thought if I got hold of a fake bottle, that just looked like the original bottle, it would do just as well. You remember how dusty and dirty it was, so that you could hardly read the label?"

"Yes?"

"It was in the cellar," Celia told him, "among dozens and dozens of other discarded bottles. All dirty. I never thought. . ."

"The cellar here at Caswall, you mean?"

"Don! No! There's no cellar here, except the nun's rooms, ind they're not really cellars. I mean at Widestairs. That was why I never dreamed of associating it with the real bottle, because I thought Margot’d thrown the real bottle into the moat"

"You found it in the cellar at Widestairs?"

"Yes."

Holden stepped back, away from the blaze of sun at the oriel window and the loom of a stableyard clock whose hands now pointed to fifteen minutes past twelve.

It was, he thought, exactly the sort of bitter and ironical situation he might have expected. Celia, in frantic search of an imitation bottle, finds the original and doesn't know it. Back comes boomeranging the evidence against this wily mistress of crime, who hasn't even the detective-story knowledge to remove her fingerprints from the bottle.

Celia finds the bottle (significantly?) at Widestairs. But could they prove that? Would the police believe it?

(It seemed to him that, somewhere in the galleries beyond the padded door, Dr. Fell was bellowing his name.)

"And, Don!" Celia put her hand on his arm. "I—I didn't know it until last night. It was only a guess or a joke before then. But Margot really did have a lover."

"How did you learn that?"

"In Margot's sitting room last night," Celia shivered, "in that Chinese Chippendale writing desk, we found the receipted bill."

"What receipted bill?"

"For a year's rent (yes, a year's! It must have been rather a grand passion) of flat something-or-other at number 56b New Bond Street The fortune-telling place! Dr. Fell seemed awfully excited about it. The bill was dated early in last August. Dr. Fell even put through a call to the London Exchange, and found there's a phone still listed in Madame Vanya's name. I'm not sure what Dr. Fell is after . .."

(Now the distant bellowing voice was plainer.) I'm sure what he's after," said Holden, suddenly waking up. "He wants to send me there, because the place is still intact And he says something devilish will happen unless I catch that train! And the time now ... Celia!"

"Yes?"

"You said once, if I remember correctly, that you'd have been glad if Margot had become somebody's mistress?"

"I did say it," Celia's eyes blazed, "and I do say it"

'You're wrong, my dear. It was the worst move she ever made."

"Why?"

"Because one thing," said Holden, "now seems fairly certain. When we find Margot's lover, we are going to find the murderer."

CHAPTER XVI

Margot's lover . ..

Or, after all, was lie on the wrong track?

New Bond Street, when Holden's taxi set him down at the end of Oxford Street, had a gray-and-white solidity in mid-afternoon sunshine. Once the thoroughfare of fashion, it is now at least the thoroughfare of expense. Though less narrow than Old Bond Street, and with shop numbers less designed to confuse the enemy, it seemed a backwater after the Oxford Street tumult where a terrific walking race seems always in progress by half the population of London.

Nevertheless, even here, traffic plunged. Large if sedate banners, floating from second-floor flagstaffs, waved allurements in colored letters.

Contemporary Paintings said one. Modern Masters! said another. Everything Photographic! rather sweepingly proclaimed a third. Mr. Doc, a fourth said curtly in French, Artist-Hairdresser! Brave but a little dingy, like shop fronts chary of exposing too much glass.

Plate and jewels behind wire netting. Furs. Gowns. Porcelain. Art galleries that showed dim recesses of green walls and gilt frames. Long windows displaying antique furniture, of heavy leopardlike magnificence. Holden saw it flow past beyond a dodging screen of pedestrians. 56b, now . . .

55b should be on the left-hand side of the street, unless the London County Council's usual sense of humor suddenly set the numbers running the other way.

56b, Got itl

Holden, walking rapidly on the right-hand side, dodged into a doorway to reconnoiter the address opposite. He was a little surprised to see, on the wall beside him, a brass plate—announcing that upstairs was a Marriage Bureau, personal and confidential introductions performed. At another time he would have been intrigued with wondering what happened if you just walked upstairs and went in. But he had too much on his mind now.All the way up in the train, from Chippenham to Paddington, he had wildly mulled over those last instructions of Dr. Fell.

"I have not time," said Dr. Fell, who would have had plenty of time if only he had ceased his roundabout style of speech, "to explain fully. But I call your attention to the problem of the black velvet gown."

"If you want to catch that train," said Mr. Derek Hurst- . Gore, who had generously offered to drive him there, "you'd better hurry."

"We agree," thundered Dr. Fell so upset he could think of only one thing at a time, "we agree that Mrs. Marsh herself put on the black velvet gown in which she was found dying. | She did it because of some sentimental association. Ah! But what association?"

"It is getting late," Celia urged.

"I have questioned," Dr. Fell pointed at Celia and Mr. Hunt-Gore, "these two here. Early this morning I questioned Sir Danvers Locke, Lady Locke, Doris Locke, Ronald Merrick, Miss Obey, and Miss Cook. Nobody has ever seen Mrs. Marsh wearing the black velvet, though it has been i seen in her dress cupboard."

"That’s perfectly true," agreed Celia. "It’s now twenty-five minutes past noon."

"I have not," Dr. Fell looked at Holden, "a key to the premises at 56b New Bond Street. You (harrumph) are familiar with the technique of breaking and entering?"

"I've been known to employ it," Holden said dryly.

"And you can make a thorough search?"

"Yes! But that’s just it! What am I supposed to be searching for?"

"Dash it all!" said Dr. Fell, drawing a hand across his fore-head. "Didn't I explain?"

"No, you didn't. How the hell can I find any evidence against a murderer if you don't tell me what I'm looking for?"

"But, my dear sir! I don't want any evidence against the murderer!"

"You . . . ?" Holden regarded him in stupefaction.

"Not as such. No, no, no!" Dr. Fell assured him. "Just get me proof as to who was the man in the case, the amant du coeur, and I will apply it to explain what evidence is now in my possession.

"It also seems to me," added Dr. Fell, mopping his forehead, "that you are being extremely dilatory, my dear sir, and wasting an unconscionable amount of time in talking, when there is the greatest need for haste. This is really serious. There may only be a theft Or there may be—" "Well?"

"A tragedy," said Dr. Fell.

In New Bond Street as Holden instinctively dodged into a doorway and mocked at himself for doing it a string of heavy lorries rumbled past. Odd, how old instincts stayed with youl Even the sight of a British policeman, directing traffic at the intersection of Grosvenor Street, gave him a slight jump.

He looked across at the premises of 56b.

It was a narrow stone front built perhaps fifty years ago; it had three floors above the ground floor, which was a bookshop agleam with rich bindings. On its left was an art gallery, on its right a stationer's displaying fans of blue note paper and envelopes. Just to the left of the bookshop he saw a big door wide open on a passage, presumably leading to stairs at the back.

Holden's eyes went up to the dead-looking, shadowed windows of the floors above the bookshop. Each floor showed two windows between stone pillars. The first set bore large gilt handwriting which said, Archer; Furs; that was no good. The two upper pairs of windows might have been curtained or merely shadowed, occupied or unoccupied; they remained blank.

It was one of the two upper floors, then.

Holden crossed the street.

At the left of the open door, under a brass plate of Sedwick & Co. Ltd., he was surprised to see a smaller plate reading, Madame Vanya.

This was carrying realism rather far: Had Margot, as a sort of huge secret joke, really been practicing a fortune-telling trade here and bamboozling genuine clients? Such things were not unknown. Though Doris Locke had professed to find it so very modem, it was an old trick of the seventeenth century. And fortune telling was not against the law, unless you professed to psychic powers. But Margot? Of all people, Margot?

A low-ceihnged passage, dimly lighted by a concealed electric bulb on each landing, ran to a flight of stairs at the back. The place smelled of fresh brown paint; the brass bindings on the stair treads were new.

As he went up the stairs, he had to remind himself again that he was not in a foreign country; he was in England, in peacetime, at half-past three of a drowsy July afternoon. Yet , the palms of his hands were tingling and old memories returned.

Archer; Furs.

A long strip of a landing, the wall unbroken except for one door, of yellow-varnished oak with a Yale lock, at the side and toward the front On the landing, by the stairs, a window giving on a dingy two-foot air space between this and the next house.

He moved on to the floor above. Exactly the same, except that there was no sign on the door. Oak door and Yale lock; that was bad.

This might be Sedgwick & Co. Ltd., or it might be Madame Vanya. If it were the first whatever their business ! might be, the thing to do was to open the door and stroll in | with some casual question. He turned the knob, easing it over gently, with the same instinct. It was not locked. He opened it.

It was Sedgwick & Co., and they were theatrical costumiers.

One comprehensive glance showed him a long dusky room, apparently empty, with two windows overlooking the street on the narrow side. Wigs, of extraordinary life-likeness, loomed up on the narrow stems of their wooden blocks. In one corner stood a female lay figure, in a fur-trimmed costume of the nineties. High rows of shelves, with costumes pressed flat stretched along the opposite wall.

Then, as Holden was about to close the door, a voice spoke out of the empty air. That voice said, very distinctly:

"The secret of the vault"

Holden stood motionless, the door halfway open. It was as though he had caught that disembodied voice at the end of a sentence. For it continued, in the same agreeable way:

"Shall I tell you, between ourselves, how those coffins were really moved?"

A light flashed on somewhere at the rear of the room. And Holden, peering through the long crack between the hinges of the door, now understood.

The premises of Sedgwick & Co. comprised two rooms set in a line from front to back. In the rear room beyond an open door, someone was seated in front of a triple mirror—-his back to the communicating door; and a light had just been switched on above him.

The front room was heavily carpeted. Holden slipped in without noise, and looked.

Facing him in the mirror, past the shoulder of the person who sat in the rear room, was a countenance of fat repulsiveness: high colored, yet pock marked and heavy jowled, sagging of eye, leering like a satyr under the white court wig.

The face admired itself. It tilted up its chin, turning from side to side, pleased with the puffy cheeks. It cocked its head like a bird's. Repeated in the triple mirrors, its moppings and mowings flashed, slyly, from every angle. Then it elongated itself when hands appeared on either side; the eyes were punched out into black holes.

It was a mask. Out of it emerged the thoughtful face of Sir Danvers Locke.

"Not bad," Locke commented. "But the price is too high."

"The price'" murmured another voice, in tones faintly shocked and reproachful. "The price!"

It was a woman's voice, pleasant, between youth and middle-age, and unmistakably French.

"These masks," the woman said, "are the work of Joyet."

"Yes. Quite."

"They are his best work. They are the last work he has done before he died." Her voice grew more reproachful. "I have sent you a special telegram to come quickly and see them."

"I know. And I'm grateful." Locke drummed his fingers on the table of the mirrors. He glanced up, past the light shining on his gray hair, at the invisible woman. His tone changed. "May I say, Mademoiselle Frey, that it is a great relief to come here and talk to you sometimes?"

"But it is a compliment!"

"You know nothing of me or my affairs. Beyond making sure my check is good, you don't want to know anything."

In the mirror above his head there was the shadow of a shrug. Abruptly, as though this made matters easier, Locke spoke in French.

"I am not," he said, "a man who speaks easily at home or even among his friends. And I am much troubled."

"Yes," Mademoiselle Frey agreed quietly, also in French. "One comprehends that. But monsieur was not serious about these . . . coffins?"

"Yes. Very serious."

"I myself," cried the woman, "have interred my brother. It was an interment of the first class. The coffin—"

"The coffin of the lady in question," said Locke, with his eye on a corner of the mirror, "was an inner coffin of wood, an outer casing of lead, then an outer wooden shell. Massive, airtight, good for years against corruption. So also was the coffin of one John Devereux, a cabinet minister under Lord Palmerston, the coffin made in mid-nineteenth century. Each of them: eight hundred pounds."

The woman's voice went up shrilly.

"You speak of the price?"

"No. I speak of the weight"

"Mais c'est incroyable. No, no, no! You are mocking me!" "I assure you I am not"

"Such a formidable weight is moved about in this tomb; it would require six men; yet no footprint is in the sand? It is impossible!"

On the contrary. It would not require six men. And this joke is very simple, when you learn the secret of it" The old, aching riddle!

Holden, who knew he could not be seen beyond that down-shining light over the minors, stood rigid and motionless.

"I claim no credit, you comprehend," Locke went on, "for knowing this. It has happened before, twice in England, and once perhaps at a place called Oese! in the Baltic. In the library at Cas—at a certain place; forgive me if I do not mention names—there is a book giving all details.

"For myself," he declared in his smooth finely enunciated French, "I hear nothing of this at an interview early this morning with a certain Dr. Fe—a certain doctor of philosophy. No! I hear it only when I am entering the train, with a friend of mine, from a certain police inspector. I told him how the trick was done. He shook hands with me, this Crawford, and said it would enable them to arrest somebody."

Arrest "somebody"?

Arrest Celia! Holden, feeling that some fragile shield hitherto guarding Celia had been broken to bits, started to back toward the door over the soft thick carpet. Yet Locke's face in the mirror still kept him there, because its expression was so strained and more thoroughly human than he had ever seen it.

"And yet" Locke said, "this is not what troubles me."

"Indeed?" his companion murmured coldly. "Will it please you to see some more of Joyce's masks?"

"You think I am mocking you over this matter of the coffins?"

"Monsieur buys here. It is his privilege, within limits, to say what he likes." "Mademoiselle, for God's sake!"

Locke struck the table. His urbane countenance was pitted with wrinkles. His pale eyes, over the high cheekbones, were turned up pleadingly.

"I was not a young man," he said, "when I married. I have a daughter, now age nineteen."

His companion's voice softened immediately. This was something understandable.

"And you are concerned about her?"

"Yes!"

"Without doubt she is a young girl of good character?"

"Good character? What is that? I don't know. As good, I suppose, as that of most, girls who run the streets nowadays.— Give me another of the masks."

"Come, monsieur!" Mademoiselle Prey's voice was laughing and chiding at once; all asparkle. "Come, now! You must not speak like that!"

"No?"

"It is cynical. It is not nice."

"Young people," said Locke, "are utterly callous. You agree?"

"Come, now!"

"And sometimes utterly ruthless. This is not out of any brutality. It is because they cannot see the effect of their actions on any person except themselves."

Briefly Locke held up another mask before his face without putting it on. The features of a young girl, exquisitely tinted, as real as a living face, serene and innocent even to the long eyelashes, appeared in the glass.

"They are blind," the eyes in the mirror closed, "to any consideration except self-interest They want something. They must have it. Point out to them that this is wrong; they will agree with you, perhaps sincerely, and in the next moment forget it Youth is a cruel time."

The mask dropped.

"Now I will tell you, a stranger, what I would not tell my own wife."

"Monsieur," said the woman, "you frighten me."

"I beg your pardon. Most humbly. I will stop talking."

"No, no, no! I wish to hear! And yet .. ."

"Yesterday evening," said Locke, "when a group of us were being questioned by the doctor of philosophy in question, there occurred to me suddenly a new and unpleasant idea. I could not credit it I cannot credit it even now."

"It occurred to me because of a question asked by this Dr. Fell. He suddenly asked, for no apparent reason, whether the lady who died—a handsome lady, in the full strength of her beauty—had visited my house on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December.

"I answered, truthfully, that she had. I did not add something else. I dared not add it I will not add it But shortly after she left my house I saw her, through my study window, walking in the frost-covered fields. There was someone with her."

Again Locke held up a mask to his eyes; and the face that sprang out of the glass was the face of a devil.

"I will deny this if I am asked. I can laugh at it But the person in question handed to her something which I now half-believe to have been a small brown bottle. A bottle that..."

"One moment, monsieur," the woman said. "I believe the outer door of our shop is now open."

There was a jarring and blurring of the mirror. The devil mask slipped and dropped. Several things occurred with blinding swiftness.

Before Mademoiselle Frey could reach the front room of Sedgwick & Co., Holden was out in the passage. But he had no intention of flight, even if unobserved flight had been possible in that bare passage with its stairways up and down. In a split second he had made and discarded two plans, finding a third which was better for what he wished to discover.

As Mademoiselle Frey opened the door wide, he was standing in front of it with his hand upraised as though to knock.

Mademoiselle Frey was a slim, sturdy woman in her middle thirties. Though she was not pretty, with black hair and black eyes against an intense pallor and a vividness of lipstick, yet her vitality and sympathy made her seem so.

At the moment her eyes looked dazed, deeply immersed, in Danvers Locke's story; fascinated by Locke as so many people were fascinated by him. And, as Holden had hoped for, her complete absorption in a French-told narrative made her speak, abruptly and automatically, in French.

"Et alors, monsieur? Vous desirez?"

"I ask your pardon, mademoiselle!" Holden said loudly, in the same language.

He wanted Locke to overhear him, if Locke did not recognize his voice. And the best way to disguise your voice is merely to speak in another language, since the listener's ear is deaf to the accents it expects.

"I ask your pardon, mademoiselle! But I am looking for Madame Vanya."

"Madame Vanya?" The dark eyes looked blank.

"She is"—he made the accent deliberately clumsy—"she is a reader of the future."

"Ah! Madame Vanya!" cried the other. "Madame Vanya is not here. She is upstairs."

"I am desolated to have troubled you, mademoiselle!"

"There is nothing at all, monsieur."

The door closed.

Holden went quickly up the stairs to the top floor. It was very hot here under the roof. A dim little bulb burned in one corner. Leaning over the railing of the landing, keeping as far back as possible, yet staring very hard at the door of Sedgwick & Co. downstairs, he waited with tense expectancy for what he believed would happen.

CHAPTER XVII

What the devil was Locke doing here?

It might be mere coincidence. He had said, at Widestairs last night, that he intended to come to town today. To find him buying masks in New Bond Street was not at all surprising. Yet in this particular building? In this particular building?

One thing seemed certain. If Locke knew that here upstairs was Margof 8 place of rendezvous with her unidentified lover, as Doris knew it, then no human restraint of curiosity could keep him inactive. Locke had just heard a man, speaking French with a strong English accent, inquire for Madame Vanya more than six months after Margot’s death. And this at a time when the police were investigating.

Locke would come up here, on some pretext or other! He must come up!

So Holden waited.

And the seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. Meantime, his eye measured the top floor for a possible way in. The same bare stretch of wall with its oak door and

Yale lock. Opposite, the same landing window open to a dingy air space between this and the next house. He went over and tried the knob of the door.

Locked, of course. No good at all without proper tools. But...

Low ceiling on this landing. No trap door to the roof, as there must be by law. Therefore the trap door to the roof is inside Madame Vanya's flat. Therefore the easiest means of entry is by way of the roof itself.

And still, from the floor below, nobody stirred.

You're off the track! he told himself violently. Danvers Locke doesn't know anything about this. Forget those notions that went through your head in the shock of seeing him! Forget it!

Pushing down both dusty leaves of the landing window, Holden stepped on the sill and put his head outside. The walls of the two buildings, black and scabrous brick, were not more than a couple of feet apart. Most windows in the house next door seemed either blind or boarded up. A mildewy smell drifted up from the ground some forty feet below.

He climbed to the outer sill of the window, his back to the house next door. With first one foot and then another on the joined sashes, he drew himself up still higher with one hand inside the window.

His right hand crept up to find the low stone coping round the roof above. Even at full stretch his fingers were still eighteen inches below the roof. Got to do a balancing act on these window sashes, and jump for it.

E-easy, now!

A bus rumbled in the street From the comer of his eye, through the vertical opening between these two buildings as between high canyon walls, he could see far away the glitter of motorcars. Holding himself by a fingertip balance with his left hand now outside the window, he let go and jumped.

He was off balance, but his right hand caught and gripped. His left hand caught and gripped. With both knees drawn up, with the edge of one shoe wedged into the inch-wide projection of the window top, he swung himself up to the roof and landed on his feet like a cat.

The sun dazzle smote his eyes. It was a second or two before he realized that his own apparition, shooting up out of nowhere, had caught the attention of two startled workmen on the adjoining roof behind him.

The workmen were carrying between them a very long and heavy wooden signboard inscribed with the black-and-gold inscription, Bobbington of Bath. Their heads stared over it like heads over a fence. The mouth of one was open, and that mouth was about to say. "Oi!"

Holden gave no indication that he had seen them.

He looked slowly and thoughtfully round the roof, studying it. From his pocket, in a leisurely way, he took out notebook and pencil. He frowned at the scarred gray surface of the roof, and made a note. He walked about, his footsteps creaking on tin, and made another note. He looked at the central chimney stack, one of whose chimney pots hung at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and made a series of notes.

It was only then that he addressed the workmen, in a tone of satisfied triumph.

"That'll cost 'em something in the way of a fine," he said.

" 'Strewth!" cried one of the workmen. The other did not speak, but his disgust must have reached up to the angels.

For again it must be emphasized that in this free England today you have only got to sound official, act officiously, or behave in general as though you were snooping to get the goods on somebody, and you will be accepted everywhere without question. The signboard, in wrath, executed a kind of dance. But suspicion was killed stone dead.

" 'Strewthl" repeated that disgusted voice. The signboard, maneuvering like an erratic quadruped, swung away toward the front.

Holden had already spotted the trap door leading down into Madame Vanya's rooms.

It was at the extreme rear of this narrow roof, close to the coping, well behind and to one side of another small chimney. There was also, near the chimney, a big sloping glass skylight, closely curtained on the inside; locked, immovable.

As for the trap door . . .

Most householders in this world, he was reflecting, cannot even tell you whether the attic trap in their homes is bolted or unbolted. Even if it happens to be bolted, its wood and tin are so rotted from long exposure to the weather that a sharp clasp knife will get you through to the bolt in a matter of seconds. His fingers clenched achingly on the clasp knife in his pocket.

But he could not act, dared not act, until those two men had finished hanging the sign on its metal posts facing the street

So up and down that blasted roof he walked, up and down, concealing the coal-black palms of his hands, taking notes, while the men dallied and wrangled.

It was a bright, breeze-swept place, among a forest of chimneys. Far to the south, past blitz cavities, he could see a winking of windows in Piccadilly. To the north loomed the flags over Selfridge's. The sun was declining. God Almighty, couldn't those men hurry?

Smuts blew heavily here too, because—

Holden stopped short, his eyes fixed on the little chimney at the back. Unperceived until now, by a trick or shift of the wind, a coil of yellow-gray smoke gushed over the edge of that chimney, curled up, and was blown wide.

The dark, locked rooms of Madame Vanya, deserted since Margot’s death, now had a visitor. The visitor had got there ahead of him. The visitor was burning something. It might be that vital evidence went up with that smoke.

Watchers, or no watchers, he couldn't wait. Holden went over to the trap door, and shook it gently. It was not a trap door, but a wooden-and-tin lid fitting over a hatch. Stuck, but not bolted. With a sharp heave he lifted it up, and a fraction of an inch to one side, showing darkness below. Whatever was down there, it couldn't be the room where the visitor had lighted a fire.

Pushing the lid to one side, Holden swung himself soundlessly down through the open space. While he held his weight with his right hand, with his left he pulled back the hatch cover until only a slit of light remained.

It showed him, underneath, a rusty gas range. He was in a little kitchenette; probably built out, with a bathroom beside it, at the back of the two rooms comprising this suite. Yesl There was a closed door facing front

No noise, now!

He dropped to the top of the gas range, easing his muscles and landing with only the faintest of clanks. He slid off to the floor. The musty odor of a sink long dried, of premises given over to mice, seemed to heighten an intense stillness. That faint glimmer from the hatch showed him the sink, the cabinets, the linoleum, the door facing front

When he softly turned the knob of that door, Holden smelt danger—violence, deadliness of some kind'—as clearly as you sense the atmosphere of a quarrel in the room where it has just occurred.

He started to push the door open. It met a soft obstruction of some kind; probably a curtain. Still be could see nothing. With his body in the doorway, he groped along the wall to the left. Another door, with key in it; automatically he turned the key.

Groping, he found an opening in two dust-heavy curtains which masked the doors at back. He slipped through.

"You swine," whispered a voice.

Holden stood motionless.

Whether or not he had heard that whisper, he heard the crackle and pop of a fire. He saw flickering gleams of the fire, cut off a little by some low obstruction.

The fireplace was in the right-hand wall of the room as you faced toward the front. The obstruction seemed to be a large fiat divan placed against the wall to the right of the fireplace. Of the room itself—airless, stuffy, muffled by carpet and curtain—he could make out nothing. But the fire, dying, must have been burning for some time; a heavy odor as of varnished wood in the flames, of cloth or canvas, made a reek and almost a haze.

Then it happened.

Beyond the divan, between divan and fireplace, silhouetted against the dying fire, was rising up a human head.

It rose slowly, unsteadily, into the dim silhouette of a man. There was about it a sick concentrated menace. The fire popped, flinging out an ember. The silhouette balanced itself. Suddenly its right arm went back.

Something flew at Holden, flew at his head out of the dark. The firelight struck a glassy flash from that object as it flew. Holden, dodging, heard it strike the curtained door behind him with a cushioned thud; it rebounded, thumped on the floor, and rolled slowly back toward the fire.

It was a fortune-teller's crystal.

Holden, his shoulders down, moved slowly forward toward that silhouette. The other man moved back. Not a word was spoken. A reek of burning poisoned the air. Step forward, step back. Step forward, step back. Holden began to circle as he closed in, to avoid the firelight It seemed to him, straining his eyes in the dark, that the other man was trying to reach something on the wall.

So he was. But not for the purpose Holden anticipated.

A light switch clicked. Dimmed by a very small globe of frosted glass, a lamp on a desk in the middle of the room threw out feeble illumination. Holden, dropping his arms, stared in consternation.

Thorley Marsh, with one hand on the light switch, stood looking at him in a vaguely puzzled way.

Thorley's starched collar was torn open, his black tie dragged sideways into a tight knot. Dust patched his black coat, rucked up over his shoulders. His face showed pale, with a jellylike uncertainty; yet, as always, not a strand of his glossy black hair seemed out of place.

Then Thorley’s eyes woke up.

"Don, old boy!" he said with a rush of friendliness and an attempt at a smile. He started forward, his hand extended to shake hands. He hesitated, stumbled, and pitched straight forward on his face.

That was where Holden saw the blood on the back of his head, clotting in the hair. And, as Holden's gaze moved along the floor, he could see blood smears on the fortune-teller's crystal as well.

"Thorley!" he shouted.

The bulky figure did not move.

"Thorley!"

He hurried forward, and tried to hoist Thorley up. With infinite labor, half-carrying and half-dragging him under the arms, Holden got him to the low black-velvet-covered divan.

"Thorley! Can you hear me?"

Half-supported under the shoulders, Thorley tried to speak. His lips twitched desperately, like those of a stammering man. But be could not speak. Grotesquely, two tears rolled from under his closed eyelids across his cheeks.

All the friendship Holden had ever felt for him—the memory of good nature, the memory of a hundred acts of disinterested kindliness—returned in a series of small lighted pictures with the haunting power of auld lang syne. If Thorley had tried to harm Celia . . . well, even so, you can't dislike a man when he's hurt and broken and crying.

For Thorley was badly hurt. How badly, Holden could not tell; but he didn't like the beat of the pulse. That big crystal, used as a bludgeon, would have made a murderous weapon.

Wait a minute! Telephone!

Dr. Fell had said there was a phone here, still connected. Rolling Thorley on his side, Holden swung round and surveyed the room.

It looked, he thought, like the quite genuine inner shrine of a fashionable seer. It was unrelieved black—black carpet, black wall curtains, black curtain over the skylight—except for a tall Jacobean chair, padded in scarlet damask, behind a carved desk in the middle. That would be the fortune-teller's chair; the client's chair stood opposite.

The dim little desk lamp showed ornaments disarranged on it, as though there had been a struggle there. Against one wall stood a carved cabinet, key in lock. But no telephone.

With a collapsing rattle, a gush of oily smoke, the last shreds in the fireplace tumbled down. They were simmering, fire edged; they might once have been sticks supporting bits of burned cloth, with broken lengths of varnished wood underneath them. Holden, yanking up the fire tongs and using his hands as well, raked it all out on the hearth.

But he was too late. He was too late! Whoever bad been here, whoever had battered Thorley's head with the crystal, must have slipped away from here long ago.

On the divan, Thorley moaned. Telephone!

Another door in the front walk Holden discovered, opened into a front room overlooking New Bond Street. The window curtains were not quite drawn. It was a waiting room: very much like the waiting room of a fashionable doctor, though overlaid with a more exotic tinge. There, on a little table against the wall, he found what he sought.

The only thing to do, he said to himself, is to dial 999 and call for an ambulance. That'll mean informing the police as well; it may wreck Dr. Fell's plans; but it can't be helped. Unless . . . wait; Better idea!

His right hand, which he had burned in raking out that fireplace, throbbed and flamed as he dialed another number. The buzz of the ringing tone seemed to go on interminably.

"War Office?" His voice sounded loud in that grotesque waiting room. "Extension 841, please."

Another pause, while a vibration of traffic shook against the windows.

"Extension 841? I want to speak to Colonel Warrender."

"Sorry, sir. Colonel Warrender is out."

"He's not out, damn you!" Holden could feel the startled A.T.S. girl shy away from the phone. "I can hear him rattling tea cups on his desk. Tell him Major Holden wants to speak to him on a matter of vital importance.—Hello! Frank?"

"Yes?"

In the adjoining room, Thorley Marsh began to laugh. It was a thin, vacant sound which crawled along the nerves; it was the laugh of delirium; it might be the laugh of the dying.

"Frank, I haven't got time to explain. But can you pull strings to get me, immediately, an ambulance from a discreet private nursing home to deal with somebody who's been badly hurt: probably concussion? Can you?"

"That’s absolutely impos—" Warrender began automatically. Then he stopped. "Look here. Does this concern the girl you were in such a flap about?"

"In a way, yes."

"Cripes! Have you been chucking her downstairs already?" "Frank, I'm not jokingl"

Warrendef s voice changed. "There's nothing phony about this? You give me your word nobody’ll get into trouble?" "I give you my word."

"Right!" said Warrender. "What’s the address?" Holden gave it "Your ambulance will be there in ten minutes, and no questions asked. Tell me about it later."

And he rang off.

Holden sat back in the chair by the little table. His hand throbbed like fire. The sick taste of failure was in his mouth, of being too late and missing the murderer. What murderer? Never mind. He had been told to search; and, by the six horns of Satan, he would search.

He went back to the black-draped room whose small glimmer of desk light only weighted the shadows. There was nothing he could do for Thorley, who lay in a stupor, breathing stertorously. Beyond the desk loomed the scarlet damask of the tall chair. He inspected the desk.

Its disarranged black covering, he now saw with repulsion, was antique funeral pall. It breathed of more than mere hocus-pocus; it hinted at the abnormal. Crumpled back as though in a struggle, it was stained with one or two spots of drying blood.

Aside from the crystal holder, it bore only two other objects. One was an ibis head of green jade, rolled almost to the edge of the desk. The other was a flat bronze plaque, engraved with a design and a few lines of. . .

Familiar?

Yes! The design on that plaque was the same as the design on the lower part of the gold ring with which Dr. Fell had sealed the tomb. Holden bent closer to read what was underneath.

Here is a sleeping sphinx. She is dreaming of the Parabrahm, of the universe and the destiny of man. She is part human, as representing the higher principle, and part beast, as representing the lower. She also symbolizes the two selves: the outer self which all the world may see, and the inner self which may be known to few.

Disregarding this mysticism, Holden went swiftly through the drawers of the desk. All were unlocked and empty. Nothing: not so much as a coin or a discarded newspaper. He measured for secret compartments, but there were none.

The carved cabinet, then? The cabinet, with the key in its lock, against the wall opposite the fireplace?

Thorley moaned, and cried out in stupor, as Holden opened the cabinet Inside he discovered a small but very modern steel filing cabinet, whose drawers rolled smoothly open. There were only blank index cards, but many gaps, and traces of cardboard adhering to the central rod where other index cards had been torn out. Those cardboard traces felt dry and harsh to the touch; they had not, he thought, been torn out today or even recently.

Gone were the names of Madame Vanya's fortune-telling clients; destroyed some time ago. Nothing here either. And yet...

He studied the outer wooden cabinet.

It was authentic Florentine Renaissance, scrolled with arms and saints. It might have come from Caswall. Whistling softly, he snapped on the flame of his pocket lighter and examined the lower part. To blot out from his own ears the noise of Thorley's breathing, now grown harsh and rattling like a man gasping for life, Holden spoke aloud.

"Now when an Italian craftsman of the great age makes his baseboard half an inch too high for proportion, it's interesting. When he decorates it with rosettes, and one of them has a center slightly larger than the others . . . Thorley, for God's sake be quiet!"

The unconscious man laughed.

"Be quiet, Thorley! I can't help you! The ambulance wfll be here in a minute!"

Holden had forgotten his burned hand now. The blood beat in his ears. He knelt down by the lower edge of that carved cabinet, and prodded at the rosette whose center was larger than the others.

There was a faint click. Feeling for the undermost edge, he drew out a very shallow drawer nearly filled with large sheets of gray note paper in Margot Devereux's rapid, clear, unmistakable handwriting.

Love letters written by Margot the topmost one dated, Afternoon, December 22nd. He hadn't failed, after all.

Holden blew out the lighter flame, which was sizzling and scorching the wick. He knelt there in semidarkness, partly lifting the topmost letter, yet feeling an intense reluctance now to read it Dead Margot with her brown eyes and her dimples, seemed to walk in the room.

He got up, and dropped the lighter back in his pocket. He went back to the desk, where he spread out that letter on the funeral pall beside the dim lamp. The words lived again, the personality lived again, in what Margot had written:

Mv dearest:

I'm not going to post this to you, or even give it to you, any more than any of the other letters. Is that silly? And yet it's the only way I have of being with you when you're not here, not here, not here. This time tomorrow, or two days from now, it will all be settled. Whether we many, or whether we die. But—

Holden's eyes stopped. Here, in part at least was ringing confirmation of a certain theory. The next part of the letter he dodged over. It was composed of intimacies explicitly described and set down. And then:

Sometimes I think you don't love me at all. Sometimes I think you almost hate me. But that couldn't be, could it? If you're willing for what we plan? Forgive me for thinking that! Sometimes I get pleasure just from repeating your name, over and over. I say to myself—

Holden raised his head quickly.

The outer door of this flat the solid Yale-locked door giving on the passage outside, was in the front room. But the sound penetrated very distinctly. Someone was softly rapping on that door.

CHAPTER XVIII

It might be the ambulance men, of courae. He didn't associate that soft hesitant almost furtive rapping with any such errand. All the same, it might be the ambulance men.

Hurrying round the desk, Holden saw against the carpet the blood-smeared crystal with which, presumably, Thorley Marsh had been struck down. The people from the nursing home mustn't see it or hear about it—yet.

Regardless of fingerprints he picked it up, cradling it in Margof s letter, and carried it to the desk. When you straightened the pall cover, setting the crystal back in its holder and turning it round, the few blood smears were scarcely visible.

At the outer door, that soft rapping began again.

Holden set the desk lamp a Utile farther away on the table cover. Then, straightening his shoulders, he went into the front room. Drawing a deep breath, he twisted the knob of the Yale lock and opened the door.

Outside, with frightened faces, stood Celia Devereux and Dr. Gideon Fell.

Donald Holden could not have said whom or what he expected to find there: human being, beast, or devil. Yet certainly not these two. He backed away several paces, clutching Margot’s letter.

"Are you—are you all right?" cried Celia.

'Yes, of course I'm all right. What are you doing here?"

"You look terribly rumpled up. Has there been a fight or something?"

'Yes. There's been a fight right enough. But I haven't been in it."

Celia edged through the doorway. Her eyes, roving round this front room which might have been a fashionable doctor's waiting room, were furtive yet burning with curiosity. Dr. Fell, a wild-haired mammoth who had left behind hat, cloak, and one walking stick, breathed gustily as he lumbered in.

"Sir," he began, getting his voice level after a vast throat clearing, "our friend Inspector Crawford has discovered how the trick of moving the coffins was worked in the vault"

'Yes. I know."

"You know?"

"Danvers Locke told him. Locke's here now."

Dr. Fell's eyes flashed open. "Here?"

"Not in these rooms, no. He's downstairs, buying masks, at a place called Sedgwick & Co. Or he was. Anyway, he told Crawford."

"So it seemed advisable," grunted Dr. Fell, drawing a hand across his forehead, "to spirit the young lady away from police questioning until we could, or could not prove something." He paused. "Mr. Hurst-Gore very kindly drove us to town. But he (harrumph) was compelled to drop us at Knightsbridge, and we have been more than an hour in getting here." Again Dr. Fell mopped his forehead, as though reluctant to approach what he must approach. "Well, my friend? What has been happening?" . Holden told them.

"Thorley," whispered Celia. "Thorley!"

"Celial Please don't go into the other room!"

"A-all right, Don. Whatever you say."

Dr. Fell listened without comment. Yet, though he seemed no less grave, relief radiated from him like steam from a furnace.

"Thank you," he said, lifting his hand to shade his eyeglasses. "You have done well. Now will you please wait here for a moment: both of you. Er—better leave this front door open. In addition to your nursing-home people, I'm expecting our friend Shepton."

Holden stared at him. "Dr. Shepton?"

"Yes. I practically kidnapped the good gentleman from Caswall village. At the moment he is buying tobacco downstairs."

And Dr. Fell, without a word more of explanation, moved into the inner room. Holden and Celia were looking at each other in the hot, airless semi-gloom of the waiting room. Then Celia spoke in a low voice, dropping her eyes.

"Don."

"Yes?"

"That letter in your hand. Dr. Fell's been telling me a good deal about this. Is the letter one of Margof s?" 'Yes."

"May I read it?" Celia extended her hand.

"Celia, I'd rather you didn't! I . . ."

The slow smile, with the twitch of weariness or mockery at one comer of the Up, crept up into the clear tenderness of her eyes.

"Do you, of all people," she said, "think I mustn't be told about such things? I'm Margof s sister, you know. I can fall in love terribly too; and I have. Oh, Don!"

"All right. Here you are."

Now there were two persons to watch, in the silence that followed.

Celia took the letter and went to the window. She drew back one set of curtains with a wooden rattle of rings. Yet she hesitated, eyelashes lowered, with the letter pressed against her side, before she began to read.

In the adjoining room, the black-draped room with the crystal, Dr. Fell's tread could be heard all this time like the tread of an elephant. First he had blinked carefully down, through glasses that wouldn't stay straight, at the black fragments Holden had raked out of the fireplace.

Next he approached the back of the room, where curtains screened two doors set side by side. Billowing among the curtains, Dr. Fell opened the left-hand door, snapped on a light, and glanced into the kitchenette by which Holden had entered. Then he unlocked the right-hand door: a bathroom, as Holden could now see for himself as Dr. Fell switched on the light

Celia began reading the letter. Her color rose and deepened, but her expression never changed and she did not raise her eyes.

Dr. Fell, after standing for some time in mountainous immobility at the door of the bathroom, switched off the light and closed the door. He wheeled round, his shaggy head lifted. And . . .

"Nol" cried Celia. "No, no, no!"

Holden, who had been trying to watch both of them at once, felt his flesh go hot and cold at the suddenness of that exclamation.

"I'm sorry," said Celia, controlling herself. "But this name!" "What name?"

"The man Margot was in love with." Amazement incredulity was there a slight disgust as well?) trembled in Celia's voice. " 'Sometimes I get pleasure just from repeating your name, over and over.' And here it is, about six times."

Celia stared at the past

"But that explains—oh, that explains everything! Don! Didn't you read this letter?"

"I started to read it yes. But that was when you and Dr. Fell knocked at the door. Who is the swine, anyway?"

Up the stairs out in the passage, with the effect of a competent quiet invasion, came a brisk young bachelor of medicine followed by two men carrying a folded stretcher. The young doctor made a feint of rapping on the inside of the open door.

"Emergency case?"

Holden nodded toward the back room. The deputation was met by Dr. Fell, who closed the door after them; and they could hear Dr. Fell's voice upraised in rapid speech as he did so.

Someone had followed the newcomers up the stairs. Old Dr. Eric Shepton, panting a little from the climb, his Panama hat in his hands and his white hair fluffed out round the bald head, loomed up big and stoop shouldered in the doorway. The kindly eye, the stubborn reticent jaw, had an air subtly different from his bearing in the playground.

"Celia, my dear!" he began.

Celia was paying no attention.

"At first it seems utterly incredible!" she said, taking a quick look at the letter and then folding it up into small creases. "And yet," she added, "is it so incredible? When you think of Margot? No. It's dreadfully right."

"Er—Celia, my dear!"

Celia woke up.

"You wouldn t speak to me," Shepton told her in a half-humorous tone, "all the way up in the car. And I hardly liked to speak in front of a stranger like Mr. Hurst-Gore. But I'm only a country g.p. I make more mistakes than I like to think, let alone admit If I've made a mistake in your case ..."

"Dr. Shepton!" Celia's eyes opened wide. "You don't think I'm holding that against you?"

The other looked startled. "Weren't you?"

"I told lies," said Celia, with a calmness which concealed misery. "What could you, or any decent person, possibly think? They'll probably arrest me; and heaven knows I shall deserve it" She put her hands over her eyes, and then flung them away again. "But why, oh, why couldn't you have told me about the other matter?"

"Because I was right not to do so," retorted the other, with a good deal of the kindliness vanishing under a hard shell. "And, London detectives or no London detectives, I still think I was right"

"Dr. Shepton, if you'd only told me!"

The door to the rear room opened.

Holden had no time to think about the meaning of the cryptic speeches he had just heard, though pain and anguish rang in Celia's voice.

Thorley Marsh, muffled to the head in a white covering, was gently and dexterously moved out on the stretcher. Thorley was still unconscious. But he was sobbing, in great gulping sobs which shook the white cloth.

The young physician from the nursing home, whose face was very grave, turned and addressed Dr. Fell.

"You understand, sir, that this will have to be reported to the police?"

"Sir," returned Dr. FelL "by all means. You also have my assurance that I will report it myself. Exactly—how is he?"

"Pretty bad."

"Oh, ahl But I mean . .. ?"

"About one chance in ten. Gently, boys!"

I can't, Holden was thinking to himself, I can't stand that sobbing much longer. Thorley might know nothing; might feel nothing; he wandered mindless in some dim hinterland. Yet even in unconsciousness there is no sobbing without rooted cause.

Celia, her hands again pressed over her eyes, turned her back as that cortege went downstairs. Nobody spoke. Up the stairs after it had passed, moving softly, but gazing down at Thorley, came Sir Danvers Locke.

Locke, fastidious in an admirably cut blue suit, carrying a gray Homburg hat, gray gloves, and a walking stick, stood in the doorway in silence. The flesh was strained tight over his cheek bones; his mouth looked uncertain.

"If they'd only told me!" cried Celia. "If they'd only told me!"

Dr. Fell, so vast that he had to maneuver sideways through the door of the rear room and duck his head under it, now towered among them. His face was fiery.

"My friend," he said to Holden, "this has gone far enough. We are going to end it That contraption!" He pointed to the telephone with his cane.

'Yes?’'

"It is (harrumph) erratic and unreliable. It never gets me the number I dial. Will you be good enough to outwit the blighter," intoned Dr. Fell, running his hand through his hair, "and get me the number I want?"

"Certainly. What number?"

"Whitehall 1212."

A stir, as of a very slight shock of electricity tingling the muscles, ran through the group at mention of that famous phone number. Seven times the dial whirred and clicked back. Then Holden handed the phone to Dr. Fell.

"Metropolitan police?" roared Dr. Fell, his several chins thrown back and his eyes villainously squinted at a comer of the ceiling. "I want to speak to Superintendent Hadley. My name is ... oh, you recognize my voice? Yes; I’ll hold on."

As though she could endure the atmosphere of this room no longer, Celia raised the window by which she was stand' ing. A gust of cooler air, grateful and cleansing, swept out the brocade curtains.

"Hadley?" said Dr. Fell, holding up the phone as though it were a jug from which he was about to drink. "I say. About this Caswall business."

The telephone spoke rapidly from the other end,

"Sol" intoned Dr. Fell. "You got the order through and the post-mortem done in one day? What was it? Was it morphine and belladonna? Oh, ah. Good!"

Dr. Eric Shepton, staring at the floor, shook his head violently as though denying this. But Sir Danvers Locke was a picture of understanding.

"Well, look here," said Dr. Fell. "I'm now at 56b New Bond Street, top floor. Can you come over here straightaway?"

The telephone made angry protests, concluding with a single-word query.

"If you do," replied Dr. Fell, "I will present you with the murderer of Mrs. Marsh and the attempted murderer of Thorley Marsh."

Celia opened the other window, which ran up with a screech. Nobody else moved or spoke.

"No, of course I'm not jokingl" roared Dr. Fell. His eye wandered round. "I have with me a group of (harrumph) friends now. Perhaps others will join us. I propose to begin now, and tell them the whole story.—When may we expect you? Right!"

He set back the phone with a clatter on its cradle, and swung round.

"One Hadley," he said, "one arrest."

Sir Danvers Locke, uttering a small cough to attract attention, moved forward. Of all the persons here, Holden wished most he could read the thoughts in Locke's head. When he thought of Locke sitting before a mirror, in the sympathetic presence of Mademoiselle Frey, and talking in a wild way about the "callousness and ruthlessness" of his own daughter (why Doris?), Holden could fit together no decipherable pattern.

"Dr. Fell!" said Locke. He paused for a moment. "Do you indeed propose to tell—the whole story?"

Nerve tension, under this studious politeness, was steadily going up.

"Yes,' returned Dr. Fell.

"Do you mind, then, if I join you?"

"On the contrary, sir." Dr. Fell fumbled at his eyeglasses. "Your presence is almost a necessity." He paused. "I do not ask the obvious question."

"And yet," said Locke, "I will answer it"

Locke glanced sideways, through the doorway on his left into the black-draped room where the crystal glimmered on the desk.

"I did not know," he spoke with painful enunciation, "that these rooms were here. Perhaps I suspected they might be somewhere . . ."

"Somewhere?"

"In London. We overhear our children speaking, just as they overhear us. But that they were here," the ferrule of his walking stick thudded softly on the carpet "just over a place where I go two or three times a year to buy masks: this, on my oath, I did not know."

"Come into the next room," Dr. Fell said curtly. "Bring chairs."

As the group moved in, slowly and somberly, Celia hurried to Holden's side. She spoke in a whisper. "Don. What's going to happen?" "I wish I knew."

Celia reached out for his hands; and then drew back, her face whitening, as he flinched. She looked more closely. "Don! What have you done to your hand?"

"It’s only a burn. It isn't anything. Listen, Celia: I quite honestly and sincerely mean it isn't anything; and I'm ordering you not to make a fuss. Because this is no round-table discussion. Something's going to burst with a hell of a bang."

This appeared to be the opinion of Locke and Dr. Shepton, each of whom had carried a gray damask waiting room chair into the shrine.

They were watching Dr. Fell.

Dr. Fell, as though silently urging them to note everything he did, made another inspection of the black-covered room. He motioned Holden toward the secret drawer, which contained Margofs letters, at the bottom of the Florentine cabinet

Rightly interpreting this gesture, Holden took out the whole drawer, lifted it up, and put it on the side of the desk near the lamp. Into it Celia flung the letter she had been reading.

Dr. Fell picked up the letter, smoothed it out and read it

He glanced very rapidly through other sheets of blue note paper in the secret drawer. Then, after peering up at the covered skylight, and down at the carpet.as though seeking something, he lowered himself into the tall Jacobean chair behind the desk.

"Those letters—" Locke began.

Dr. Fell did not reply.

In front of him gleamed the big crystal, against the coffin pall, with the small green-jade ibis head on one side, and the little plaque of the sleeping sphinx on the other. He reached out and picked up the plaque.

" She also symbolizes,'" he read aloud, after a long pause, "'the two selves. The outer self which all the world may see—'" Dr. Fell stopped, and put down the plaque. "Yes, by thunder! That is the true application."

Slowly, while the others sat down, he fished out of his pockets an obese tobacco pouch and a curved meerschaum pipe. He filled the pipe, struck a match, and lit the tobacco with lingering care. The desk light, glimmering past the crystal, shone on his face.

"And now," said Dr. Fell, "hear the secret."

CHAPTER XIX

T ou mean," Locke asked quickly, "the murderer?

"Oh, no," said Dr. Fell and shook his head.

"But you have just been telling us ... !"

"That," continued Dr. Fell, blowing out more smoke, "can come later. I mean, at the moment, the carefully cherished secret which has sent so many persons wrong in this case."

Holden never afterward forgot their positions then.

He and Celia were sitting side by side on the huge velvet-covered divan, so sybaritic in that secret room. They saw Dr. Fell in profile, past smoke. Locke and Dr. Shepton were in chairs facing him, the former bending forward with his fingertips on the edge of the desk.

"It is all rooted, continued Dr. Fell, "in a tragic misunderstanding which has been going on for years. And it would all have been so simple, you know, if certain persons had only spoken out!”

"But, oh, no. This thing must not be discussed. This thing was very awkward, if not actually shameful. It must be hushed up. So it was hushed up. And out of it grew pain and disillusionment and more misunderstanding; and, finally, murder."

Dr. Fell paused, dispelling smoke with a wave of his hand. His eyes were fixed with fierce concentration on Sir Danvers Locke.

"Sir," inquired Dr. Fell, "do you know what hysteria is?" Locke, obviously puzzled, frowned. "Hysteria? You mean—?"

"Not," said Dr. Fell decisively, "the loose, inaccurate sense in which all of us use the term. We say a person is hysterical or behaving hysterically when he or she may only be very much upset. No, sir I referred to the nervous disease known to medical science as real hysteria.

"If I speak as a layman," he added apologeticaDy, "Dr. Shepton will (harrumph) doubtless correct me. But this hysteria, the group of associated symptoms called hysteria, may be comparatively mild. Or it may require serious treatment by a neurologist. Or it may end, and can end, in actual insanity."

Again Dr. Fell paused.

Celia, beside Holden, sat motionless with her hands on her knees and her head bent forward. But he could feel her soft arm tremble.

"Let me tell you," pursued Dr. Fell, "some of the milder symptoms of the hysteric. I repeat: the milder! Each one of them, taken by itself, is not necessarily evidence of hysteria. But you win never find the true hysteric, who may be either a woman or a man, without all of them."

"And we are dealing here—?" demanded Locke.

"With a woman," said Dr. Fen.

(Again Celia's arm trembled.)

'The hysteric is easily moved, by small things, to either laughter or tears. She is always blurting out something before realizing its meaning. The hysteric loves the limelight; she must have attention paid her; she must play the tragedy queen. The hysteric is an inordinate diary keeper, with pages and pages of events that are often untrue. The hysteric is always threatening to commit suicide, but never does it. The hysteric is unduly fascinated by the mystic or the occult The ..."

"Wait a minute" said Donald Holden. His voice exploded in that group with the effect of blast waves.

'You spoke?" inquired Dr. Fell, as though there had been some doubt of this.

"Yes; very much so. You're not describing Celia, yon know."

"Ah!" murmured Dr. Fell.

Holden swallowed hard to get his words in order.

"Celia loathes the limelight," he said, "or she'd have told her story all over the place instead of keeping it so dark. Celia never blurts out anything; she's almost too quiet. Celia can't even keep an ordinary diary, let alone the kind you're talking about. Celia admits she'd never have the courage to commit suicide. You're not describing Celia, Dr. Fell! But—"

"But?" prompted Dr. Fell.

"You've given a thunderingly accurate picture of Margot." "Got it," breathed Dr. Fell. "Do you all see the tragedy now?"

He sank back in the big chair, making a vague gesture with the pipe. There was a silence before he went on.

"There, over the green lawns of the past, walked Margot Devereux. And how the outside world misunderstood!

"Because she was robust, because she was jovial, because she liked games, they laughed and approved and applauded. 'Strapping,' they called her. 'Uninhibited,' was another word. And if at times something seemed odd? Well! Only over-hearty, which was not a bad thing. Not only did the outside world misunderstand, but they got the position the wrong way round.

"Everyone here, I imagine, has heard the famous remark which Mammy Two made on a number of occasions. 'There's a funny streak in our family, y’know. One of my granddaughters is all right, but I've been worried about the other ever since she was a little child.' And, of course, that remark was applied to the wrong person.

"Suspect Margot, the hearty and athletic? In England, good sirs? Damme! Fie upon you! So they never guessed, any more than her own sister guessed, that Margot Devereux was a hysteric with the potentialities of a dangerous hysteric.”

"But Mammy Two knew. The family doctor knew. Obey and Cook: be sure they knew. And they waited (with God knows what fear in their hearts; I am not looking at Dr. Shepton now) while Margot grew up into a very beautiful woman. Even then stark tragedy might have been averted, if . . ."

Holden sat up straight

"If—what?" he demanded.

"If Margot" replied Dr. Fell, "had not married."

Celia was trembling violently. Holden did not look at her.

"I will not" scowled Dr. Fell, "discuss the various physical causes which may bring about hysteria. Except to say this: that the hysteric becomes dominated by a fixed idea. She believes, let us say, that she is blind. To all intents and purposes, she is blind.”

"In a case like that of Margot Devereux, it is plain that to marry almost any man would be dangerous. Except in the remote chance of finding the right man, it would be disastrous. For its root is sexual.

"Once married, she discovers (or thinks she discovers, which is the same thing) that physical intimacy with her husband is a matter of horror. She screams when he approaches her. His mere touch is nausea. And the poor devil of a husband, wondering bewilderdly what is wrong and why he has turned into a leper, is faced with a raging madwoman. And this may go on for years. And nobody ever knows."

Dr. Fell paused. Distressed and yet dogged, he would not look round; he kept his eyes fixed on the crystal.

And Holden, with a chill at his heart, recognized that his most poignant memory—the marriage in Caswall Church, with the colored dresses and the echo of music—must subtly alter in line. He must reinterpret the odd looks and tears of both Mammy Two and Obey. He must reinterpret now he remembered it the frankly dubious gaze of Dr. Shepton.

But above all (curse himself for being so blind!) he must reinterpret Thorley Marsh.

He must recognize why, in seven years, there had been changes in Thorley. Moods, expressions, whole sentences spoken by Thorley, crowded back to trouble him. Best of all he remembered Thorley being questioned by Dr. Fell in the Long Gallery last night. How do you know the door to your wife's bedroom was locked on her side? "It always was." And again Thorley's blank-voiced, groping cry: "Liquor always used to make me feel happy. It never does, now."

"Dr. Fell!" Holden said softly.

"Eh?"

"This plain speaking is right Ifs got to be done. But do you think, in front of Celia—?" "I know," said Celia, and turned suddenly and put her cheek against his shoulder. "I heard about it this afternoon. But I never knew before. Dr. Fell! Tell them about . . . the seizures."

"Yes, by thunder!" said Dr. Fell in a different voice.

He put down his pipe, which had gone out.

"The hysteric, under these conditions, is afflicted with attacks in the form of physical seizures. They may be brought on by a word, a look, by nothing at all. The husband, on one occasion, may completely lose his head. To quiet that screaming, he may strike his wife across the face with a razor strap; or try to choke the cries in her throat with his hands.

"On other occasions, the attacks may be more severe. They may need medical aid. When the hysteric is afflicted like this, she has a tetanic attack—limbs rigid, body arched— exactly, to the eye of an uninformed person who sees it, like a case of strychnine poisoning."

Here Dr. Fell, wheezing angrily, looked at Danvers Locke.

"And then the hysteric, as hysterics will, admits to Celia Devereux that she has swallowed strychnine to end her tragic life! Archons of Athens! Can you wonder that another girl, perfectly normal but frightened half out of her wits because no one has seen fit to tell her, misunderstands all this? Can you wonder Celia Devereux thought what she did think? Good God, what would you expect?"

Dr. Fell controlled himself.

Breathing noisily, he wedged himself back into the chair. He was silent for a moment, one hand shading his eyeglasses. Then he addressed Dr. Shepton very quietly.

"Sir," he said, "it is not my place to question your professional conduct of this case."

"Thank you." Dr. Shepton looked back at him steadily.

"But why couldn't you have told Celia?"

Dr. Shepton, though he looked very old and very tired, kept the stubborn set of his jaw. He was bending forward, his big-knuckled hands holding the Panama hat.

"It's a pity," he murmured, shaking his head. "It's all such a pity!"

"I quite agree with you."

"But is it possible," insisted Shepton, "that you of all people still do not understand? I feared—we all feared— that..."

"That Celia, being Margot’s sister, might be a hysteric too? And that to tell her all this might do her much harm?" "In fact, yes."

("Easy, Celia!" murmured Holden.)

"Ah!" said Dr. Fell. "But, previous to Margot Marsh's death, had you ever any reason to suppose this about Celia?"

"It was always a risk. It was always a risk!"

"Sir, that was not the question I asked you. Had you any reason to suppose it?"

"Nol No! I distinctly told Sir Donald Holden, two nights ago"—Dr. Shepton lifted his Panama hat and pointed with it—"that in Celia's version of what she called strychnine poisoning, there might have been room for . .. well! certain unavoidable misunderstandings."

"There might have been room?"

"Yes. And I would have told Sir Donald the whole story, too, if he had only come around to my hotel as I suggested. In reply to your main question: no! I had no concrete reason for suspecting Celia of hysterical delusions until .. ."

Dr. Fell bent forward.

"Until, in somebody's phrase, she began seeing ghosts all over the place? Is that correct?" "Yes."

Unexpectedly, Dr. Fell began to chuckle.

It began, with slow earthquake violence, in the lower ridges of his waistcoat It traveled up the tentlike alpaca suit in a spasm of uproarious amusement. Suddenly becoming conscious of Shepton's outraged look, Dr. Fell clapped his hand over his mouth and turned to Holden.

"Forgive me!" he pleaded. "I was guilty of another such unmannerly outburst, if you recall, when I met you in the Long Gallery at Caswall. But, as we clear away the poisonous nonsense, I think you will join in. Will you cast your mind back to Wednesday evening about dusk?"

"Well?"

"To the first time you went out to the Regent's Park house?" "Well?" repeated Holden. "Well," said Dr. Fell simply, "I shadowed you." "You what?"

"I," Dr. Fell announced proudly, "shadowed somebody. Didn't I tell you you'd allowed me to accomplish something I never believed was possible? At first I didn't shadow you consciously, of course. Let me explain."

All the amusement faded out of Dr. Fell's expression. In that dim light his face looked grave and even sinister.

"Celia Devereux's letter to the police had been received two days before. It was handed over to me, who already knew something of the matter from having sealed the vault.

All the major events were outlined in that letter, including the ghosts of the Long Gallery. And I was disturbed. It seemed to me that in the elder sister we were dealing with a case of sexual hysteria—"

(For some reason, at this point, Sir Danvers Locke shuddered.)

"—and in the younger sister, perhaps, with nervous hysteria. I didn't know. I had to make sure. So on Wednesday evening, armed with the letter, I went out to the house in Gloucester Gate to ask questions.

"Ahead of me on the pavement," and again Dr. Fell nodded toward Holden, "I saw you bound for the same house.

"I had no idea who you were, or of your status in this affair. But you went in by the back way. I followed. I saw you go up those iron stairs to the balcony outside the drawing room. I saw you strike a light, and peer in through the window. I heard a girl scream (it was Doris Locke), and a man cry out It seemed so extraordinary that I followed you up.

"And what happened?

"Outside those windows I heard more of the wretched, pitiable story. The tangled livesl The enshrouding misery! I learned who you were. I heard Thorley Marsh, who sincerely believed Celia to be mad just as she believed him a sadistic brute, I heard Thorley Marsh beg and plead with you to go away. And the door opened. And Celia Devereux walked in.

Here Dr. Fell looked very steadily at Holden. "Have you forgotten," he asked, that you were supposed to be dead?"

Holden started to get up off the divan, but sat down again. Dr. Fell nodded toward Celia, who had turned her head away.

"Here is a girl," he said, "supposedly so neurotic that she is seeing ghosts everywhere. She has had no warning this man is alive. She really believes him dead. All she sees, in one terrifying flash, is his face looking at her against the light of a single lamp in a dark room.

"And yet—she knows.