All at once there was silence. Had she screamed? No, for the noise they had all heard came from somewhere inside the house. The room seemed to hold its breath. There it was again, and coming closer; a cry, a shriek, the shrill tones of terror alternating in a dreadful rhythm with a throaty, choking sound like whooping-cough. No one could have recognized it as Marion Lane’s voice, and few could have told for Marion Lane the dishevelled figure, mask in hand, that lurched through the ballroom doorway and with quick stumbling steps, before which the onlookers fell back, zigzagged into the middle of the room.

‘Stop him!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t let him do it!’ Jane Manning ran to her.

‘Dearest, what is it?’

‘It’s Harry Chichester,’ sobbed Marion, her head rolling about on her shoulders as if it had come loose. ‘He’s in there. He wants to take his mask off, but I can’t bear it! It would be awful! Oh, do take him away!’

‘Where is he?’ someone asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know! In Jane’s sitting-room. I think, He wouldn’t let me go. He’s so cold, so dreadfully cold.’

‘Look after her, Jane,’ said Jack Manning. ‘Get her out of here. Anyone coming with me?’ he asked, looking round. ‘I’m going to investigate.’

Marion caught the last words. ‘Don’t go,’ she implored. ‘He’ll hurt you.’ But her voice was drowned in the scurry and stampede of feet. The whole company was following their host. In a few moments the ballroom was empty.

Five minutes later there were voices in the ante-room. It was Manning leading back his troops. ‘Barring, of course, the revolver,’ he was saying, ‘and the few things that had been knocked over, and those scratches on the door, there wasn’t a trace. Hullo!’ he added, crossing the threshold, ‘what’s this?’

The ballroom window was open again; the curtains fluttered wildly inwards; on the boards lay a patch of nearly melted snow.

Jack Manning walked up to it. Just within the further edge, near the window, was a kind of smear, darker than the toffee-coloured mess around it, and roughly oval in shape.

‘Do you think that’s a footmark?’ he asked of the company in general.

No one could say.

A CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP

The motor-car felt its way cautiously up the little street that opened upon a field on one side, and somehow looked less suburban by night than it did by day.

‘Here?’ asked the driver, peering into the semi-rural darkness.

‘Just a little farther, if you don’t mind,’ said his friend. ‘Where you can see that black patch in the wall: that’s the gate.’

The car crept on.

‘Cold?’ demanded the man at the wheel. ‘These October nights are cold. Stuffy place, the theatre.’

‘Did I sound cold?’ asked his companion, the faint quiver renewing itself in his voice. ‘Oh, I can’t be, it’s such a little way. Feel that,’ he added, holding out his hand.

The driver applied his cheek to it and the car wobbled, bumping against the kerb.

‘Feels warm enough to me,’ he said, ‘hot, in fact. Whoa! Whoa! good horse. This it?’ he added, turning the car’s head round.

‘Yes, but don’t bother to come in, Hubert. The road is so twisty and there may be a branch down. I’m always expecting them to fall, and I’ve had a lot of them wired. You never know with these elm-trees.’

‘Jumpy kind of devil, aren’t you?’ muttered Hubert, extricating himself from the car and standing on the pavement. In the feeble moonlight he looked enormous; Ernest, fiddling with the door on his side, wondered where his friend went to when he tucked himself under the wheel. It must dig into him, he thought.

‘It’s a bit stiff, but you’re turning it the wrong way,’ said Hubert, coming round to Ernest’s side. ‘Easy does it. There you are.’ He held the door open; Ernest stumbled out, missed his footing and was for a moment lost to sight between the more important shadows of his friend and his friend’s car.

‘Hold up, hold up,’ Hubert enjoined him. ‘The road doesn’t need rolling.’ He set Ernest on his feet and the two figures, so unequal in size, gazed mutely into the black square framed by the gateway. Through the trees, which seemed still to bear their complement of boughs, they could just see the outlines of the house, which repeated by their rectangularity the lines of the gateway. It looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower. There was a tiny light in the tower, otherwise the house was dark, the windows being visible as patches of intense black, like eyeless sockets in a negro’s face.

‘You said you were alone in the house,’ remarked Hubert, breaking the silence.

‘Yes,’ his friend replied. ‘In a sense I am.’ He went on standing where he was, with the motor between him and the gateway.

‘In what sense?’ persisted his friend. ‘Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance? In that room with the light in it, for instance——’

‘Oh, no,’ Ernest protested, fidgeting with his feet. ‘That’s only the gas in the box-room. I don’t know how it comes to be alight. It ought not to be. The least thing blows it out. Sometimes I get up in the night and go and see to it. Once I went four times, because it’s so difficult with gas to make sure it’s properly turned off. If you turn it off with your thumb you may easily turn it on again with your little finger, and never notice.’

‘Well, a little puff of gas wouldn’t hurt you,’ observed Hubert, walking to the front of the car and looking at it as though in a moment he would make it do something it didn’t like. ‘Make you sleep better. How’s the insomnia?’

‘Oh, so-so.’

‘Don’t want anyone to hold your hand?’

‘My dear Hubert, of course not.’

Ernest dashingly kicked a pebble which gyrated noisily on the metal surface. When it stopped all sound seemed to cease with it.

‘Tell me about this shadowy companion, Ernest,’ said Hubert, giving one of the tyres such a pinch that Ernest thought the car would scream out.

‘Companion?’ echoed Ernest, puzzled. ‘I—I have no companion.’

‘What did you mean, then, by saying you were only alone “in a sense”?’ demanded Hubert. ‘In what sense? Think that out, my boy,’ He took a, adjusted it, and gave a savage heave. The car shuddered through its whole length and subsided spanner with a sigh.

‘I only meant——’ began Ernest.

‘Please teacher, I only meant,’ mocked Hubert grimly.

‘I only meant,’ said Ernest, ‘that there is a charwoman coming tomorrow at half-past six.’

‘And what time is it now?’

‘A quarter to twelve.’

As Ernest spoke a distant clock chimed the three-quarters—a curious unsatisfied chime that ended on a note of interrogation.

‘How the devil did you know that?’ asked Hubert, his voice rising in protest as if such knowledge were not quite nice.

‘During the night,’ replied Ernest, a hint of self-assertion making itself heard for the first time in his voice, ‘I am very sensitive to the passage of time.’

‘You ought to loan yourself to our dining-room clock,’ observed Hubert. ‘It hasn’t gone these fifteen months. But where are your servants, Ernest? Where’s the pretty parlourmaid? Tell me she’s there and I’d come and stop the night with you.’

‘She isn’t,’ said Ernest. ‘They’re away, all three of them. I came home earlier than I meant. But would you really stay, Hubert? You’ve got a long way to go—eighteen miles, isn’t it?’

‘Afraid I can’t, old man. Got some business to do early to-morrow.’

‘What a pity,’ said Ernest. ‘If I’d asked you sooner perhaps you could have stayed.’

His voice expressed dejection and Hubert, who was making ready to get into the motor, turned round, holding the door half open.

‘Look here, Ernest, I’ll stay if it’s any consolation to you.’

Ernest seemed to be revolving something in his mind.