He looked at her and said in a bewildered voice,

“What am I to do?”

Miss Silver shook her head.

“I cannot tell you that. You will know what it is yourself. It is only the first step which is hard.”

He went on looking at her. In the end he said,

“There are things I must do-I should have done them long ago. Goodbye.”

She said, “Good-night, Mr. Random,” and turned to go.

His voice followed her.

“I don’t know your name. You arc staying with Mrs. Ball, are you not?”

“Yes. My name is Maud Silver.”

He came as far as the door and held it for her to pass out. A streak of light fell from it upon the gravel path and remained there until she had turned the corner of the church.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The old church clock gave out the twelve strokes of a cloudy midnight. As a rule, when Miss Silver had read a psalm or a chapter from the shabby Bible which was her constant companion she would put out the light, arrange her two pillows to her liking, and pass immediately into a state of tranquil repose. Upon the rare occasions when this did not happen it was because her mind was too preoccupied to relax. Tonight her thoughts were very deeply occupied indeed, and not only occupied, but burdened. Annie Jackson’s words stood out among them-“These things go in threes.” Two people had been murdered. Two successive Fridays had seen a victim struck down. Tomorrow it would be Friday again. The Vicarage work-party would assemble, Arnold Random would doubtless come to his practising in the church, and the faint sounds of the organ would steal out across the churchyard and hang in the air above the watersplash.

There might be no reason for the murderer to strike again. There might be a grave and insistent reason. Only the murderer would know. And in murder, as in many other things, it is the first step that is the difficult one. A couple of homely proverbs reinforced this line of thought-“In for a penny, in for a pound,” and, “As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.” And with each step into the dark other world beyond stability, the strength of the motive required would become progressively less, until in the end there might hardly need to be a motive at all. In the unbalanced mind the link between cause and effect may be crazily wrenched, if not altogether broken.

When the church clock struck twelve Miss Silver folded back the bed-clothes and went over to the window. Her room looked towards the churchyard, very deeply covered by the cloudy darkness, very sombre, mysterious and vague, and the black church watching it, its steeple pointing to heaven. The casement window stood partly open. She loosened the catch, pushed it wide, and leaned out. The house was two-storeyed and rambling. One of the windows glowed faintly. The curtains were not drawn. The two leaves of the casement jutted out, and between them the darkness thinned away. She could discern the window-frame, the sill, and those two jutting leaves. She knew the room to be Annie’s.

After some pause for reflection she put on her warm blue dressing-gown with the hand-made crochet trimming which had already completed years of useful service upon its red flannel predecessor, and opening her door, stepped silently into the passage. The landing was not far away, and a faint light burned there. Every step towards Annie Jackson’s room would take her farther away from it, but it would serve. Her feet, in black felt slippers lined with lamb’s wool and adorned by neat blue bows, made no sound on the rather worn carpeting.

Standing before Annie’s door, a hand upon the knob, she heard a deep choking breath, and then a gasping cry, “No- no-no!”

Before the third “No!” was uttered she was in the room and the door shut behind her. She wanted neither Ruth nor the Vicar to be a witness to what might be going to take place between herself and Annie Jackson. The glow which she had seen from her window proceeded from an old-fashioned night-light stuck on a saucer and set very prudently in the basin upon Annie’s washstand. There was even a little water in the basin. Miss Lucy Wayne had evidently trained her maidservants well.

The light slanting up out of the basin threw all the shadows high. The bed, an old-fashioned single four-poster, was bare of the curtains for which it had been designed. The posts, and the rods which connected them, stood up stark like the bars of a cage. And in the middle of the bed Annie sat up straight, her hands clasped to her breast, her eyes wide, and fixed, and sightless. She was asleep, but not at rest. She walked in a dreadful dream and cried out against it.

Miss Silver stood at the bed foot and watched her. There was sweat on the face. The hair was pushed back in a disordered tangle. The mark of the bruise showed plain. She was speaking now in a rapid mutter where the words were lost. Hurry and fear, hurry and fear-they rode her, and needed no words to make themselves plain.

And then the words began to come through.

“Dark-dark-dark-” The voice was no more than a whisper at the first, but it rose to a thin trembling scream. And then the muttering-

Miss Silver made no move. She stood and watched.

Slowly and painfully, words were thrown up.

“Dark… In dark-of night-” Then, with a convulsive shudder, “Dreadful-sin-dreadful-dreadful sin-”

Somewhere in Annie Jackson’s mind there walked the ghost of Christopher Hale, drowned in the watersplash more than a hundred years ago. The words which came from her on those difficult gasping breaths were part of the verse which she and Miss Silver had read together upon the tombstone set up by his wife.

In dark of night and dreadful sin

The heart conceives its plan.

Was it really the ghost of Christopher Hale who walked in Annie’s dream, or was it the ghost of William Jackson?

Miss Silver leaned forward from where she stood at the foot of the bed and said,

“Annie!”

There was a change at once. The hands which had been clenched at the thin chest were flung out as if to ward a blow.

“I didn’t tell-I didn’t-I didn’t! No one can say I did! There isn’t no one can say I was there! There isn’t no one-” On the last word her voice faltered and dropped. Her hands dropped too. She looked about her as if she had waked in a strange place-wardrobe on the right-chest of drawers and washstand on the left, with the jug lifted out of the basin and the night-light burning.

Her troubled gaze came to rest upon Miss Silver in her blue dressing-gown, her hair very neatly controlled by the strong brown net which she wore at night.

“What-is it?”

“You have had a bad dream. You cried out.”

Annie closed her eyes. The dream still lay behind them.

“It won’t let me be-” The tears began to run down over her pinched face. “It won’t let me be. Soon as ever I lie down it’s there again. I dursn’t go to sleep but I’m down there in the dark-and the water drowning him.” Her eyes flew open suddenly. “I didn’t say it-oh-I didn’t say it!”

Miss Silver came round to the side of the bed. She sat down there.

“Annie, won’t you tell me what happened on the night your husband was drowned? If you did, I think that the dream would go away, and that you would not be troubled with it again.”

Annie stared at her with dilated eyes.

“And have them-hang me?” she said.

Miss Silver took one of the bony hands.

“Have you done anything for which they could hang you?”

The hand jerked in hers. The whole frail body jerked.

“And who’s going to believe I didn’t? Who’s going to believe me against them whose word ’ud be taken afore mine? If my Miss Lucy was here she’d speak for me. Twenty-four years is a long time to be living with anyone, and you’d know they wasn’t the kind to do murder. But she’s gone-and there’s no one now. They’d find out about the girl in Embank-and how I said I wished I was dead before I married him. And they’d see how he bruised me. It didn’t show so much at first-but they couldn’t help but see it now-not if they looked. And they’ll think I did it!”