‘A child with hunting instincts,’ said Munt pensively. ‘How can we accommodate him? I have it! Let’s play “Hide-and-Seek.” We shall hide and he shall seek. Then he can’t feel that we are forcing ourselves upon him. It will be the height of tact. He will be here in a few minutes. Let’s go and hide now.’

‘But he doesn’t know his way about the house.’

‘That will be all the more fun for him, since he likes to make discoveries on his own account.’

‘He might fall and hurt himself.’

‘Children never do. Now you run away and hide while I talk to Franklin,’ Munt continued quietly, ‘and mind you play fair, Valentine—don’t let your natural affections lead you astray. Don’t give yourself up because you’re hungry for your dinner.’

The motor that met Hugh Curtis was shiny and smart and glittered in the rays of the setting sun. The chauffeur was like an extension of it, and so quick in his movements that in the matter of stowing Hugh’s luggage, putting him in and tucking the rug round him, he seemed to steal a march on time. Hugh regretted this precipitancy, this interference with the rhythm of his thoughts. It was a foretaste of the effort of adaptability he would soon have to make; the violent mental readjustment that every visit, and specially every visit among strangers, entails: a surrender of the personality, the fanciful might call it a little death.

The car slowed down, left the main road, passed through white gateposts and followed for two or three minutes a gravel drive shadowed by trees. In the dusk Hugh could not see how far to right and left these extended. But the house, when it appeared, was plain enough: a large, regular, early nineteenth-century building, encased in cream-coloured stucco and pierced at generous intervals by large windows, some round-headed, some rectangular. It looked dignified and quiet, and in the twilight seemed to shine with a soft radiance of its own. Hugh’s spirits began to rise. In his mind’s ear he already heard the welcoming buzz of voices from a distant part of the house. He smiled at the man who opened the door. But the man didn’t return his smile, and no sound came through the gloom that spread out behind him.

‘Mr. Munt and his friends are playing “Hide-and-Seek” in the house, sir,’ the man said, with a gravity that checked Hugh’s impulse to laugh. ‘I was to tell you that the library is home, and you were to be “He”, or I think he said, “It”, sir. Mr. Munt did not want the lights turned on till the game was over.’

‘Am I to start now?’ asked Hugh, stumbling a little as he followed his guide,—‘or can I go to my room first?’

The butler stopped and opened a door. ‘This is the library,’ he said. ‘I think it was Mr. Munt’s wish that the game should begin immediately upon your arrival, sir.’

A faint coo-ee sounded through the house.

‘Mr. Munt said you could go anywhere you liked,’ the man added as he went away.

Valentine’s emotions were complex. The harmless frivolity of his mind had been thrown out of gear by its encounter with the harsher frivolity of his friend. Munt, he felt sure, had a heart of gold which he chose to hide beneath a slightly sinister exterior. With his travelling graves and charnel-talk he had hoped to get a rise out of his guest, and he had succeeded. Valentine still felt slightly unwell. But his nature was remarkably resilient, and the charming innocence of the pastime on which they were now engaged soothed and restored his spirits, gradually reaffirming his first impression of Munt as a man of fine mind and keen perceptions, a dilettante with the personal force of a man of action, a character with a vein of implacability, to be respected but not to be feared. He was conscious also of a growing desire to see Curtis; he wanted to see Curtis and Munt together, confident that two people he liked could not fail to like each other. He pictured the pleasant encounter after the mimic warfare of Hide-and-Seek—the captor and the caught laughing a little breathlessly over the diverting circumstances of their reintroduction. With every passing moment his mood grew more sanguine.

Only one misgiving remained to trouble it. He felt he wanted to confide in Curtis, tell him something of what had happened during the day; and this he could not do without being disloyal to his host. Try as he would to make light of Munt’s behaviour about his collection, it was clear he wouldn’t have given away the secret if it had not been surprised out of him. And Hugh would find his friend’s bald statement of the facts difficult to swallow.

But what was he up to, letting his thoughts run on like this? He must hide, and quickly too. His acquaintance with the lie of the house, the fruits of two visits, was scanty, and the darkness did not help him. The house was long and symmetrical; its principal bedrooms lay on the first floor. Above were servants’ rooms, attics, boxrooms, probably—plenty of natural hiding-places. The second storey was the obvious refuge.

He had been there only once, with Munt that afternoon, and he did not specially want to revisit it; but he must enter into the spirit of the game. He found the staircase and went up, then paused: there was really no light at all.

‘This is absurd,’ thought Valentine. ‘I must cheat.’ He entered the first room to the left, and turned down the switch. Nothing happened: the current had been cut off at the main. But by the light of a match he made out that he was in a combined bed-and-bathroom. In one corner was a bed, and in the other a large rectangular object with a lid over it, obviously a bath. The bath was close to the door.

As he stood debating he heard footsteps coming along the corridor. It would never do to be caught like this, without a run for his money. Quick as thought he raised the lid of the bath, which was not heavy, and slipped inside, cautiously lowering the lid.

It was narrower than the outside suggested, and it did not feel like a bath, but Valentine’s inquiries into the nature of his hiding-place were suddenly cut short. He heard voices in the room, so muffled that he did not at first know whose they were. But they were evidently in disagreement.

Valentine lifted the lid. There was no light, so he lifted it farther. Now he could hear clearly enough.

‘But I don’t know what you really want, Dick,’ Bettisher was saying. ‘With the safety-catch it would be pointless, and without it would be damned dangerous. Why not wait a bit?’

‘I shall never have a better opportunity than this,’ said Munt, but in a voice so unfamiliar that Valentine scarcely recognized it.

‘Opportunity for what?’ said Bettisher.

‘To prove whether the Travelling Grave can do what Madrali claimed for it.’

‘You mean whether it can disappear? We know it can.’

‘I mean whether it can effect somebody else’s disappearance.’

There was a pause. Then Bettisher said: ‘Give it up. That’s my advice.’

‘But he wouldn’t leave a trace,’ said Munt, half petulant, half pleading, like a thwarted child. ‘He has no relations. Nobody knows he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t here. We can tell Valentine he never turned up.’

‘We discussed all that,’ said Bettisher decisively, ‘and it won’t wash.’

There was another silence, disturbed by the distant hum of a motorcar.

‘We must go,’ said Bettisher.

But Munt appeared to detain him. Half imploring, half whining, he said:

‘Anyhow, you don’t mind me having put it there with the safety-catch down.’

‘Where?’

‘By the china-cabinet. He’s certain to run into it.’

Bettisher’s voice sounded impatiently from the passage:

‘Well, if it pleases you. But it’s quite pointless.’

Munt lingered a moment, chanting to himself in a high voice, greedy with anticipation: ‘I wonder which is up and which is down.’

When he had repeated this three times he scampered away, calling out peevishly: ‘You might have helped me, Tony. It’s so heavy for me to manage.’