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had probably seen Mavis, but it couldn’t be helped. He returned to his own hall.
    â€œI must go back,” said Lee, “before anyone comes. They’ll all be coming up and down now—Rush, and Mrs. Green—no, I don’t suppose she will, because she had one of her turns yesterday—but there’ll be Ross’s man—”
    He felt her stiffen against his arm.
    â€œHe comes about seven,” he said.
    â€œYes,” said Lee in a whisper.

CHAPTER XI
    Ross Craddock’s man came in at the front door and gave the porter a civil “Good morning, Mr. Rush.” He was a quiet, melancholy-looking man in his forties, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and sallow-skinned. “Puts me in mind of an undertaker,” Rush used to tell his wife. “And soft on his feet like a cat. Suit Mr. Pyne a treat, he would. Now I say, and I’ll hold to it, that a man that is a man, well, he walks like a man—that’s what I say. He don’t go slipping and sliding as if he didn’t want no one to know what he was up to like that there Peterson does, or a prying old maid like Miss Bingham.”
    Mr. Peterson walked softly up two flights of stairs and crossed the landing without making a sound. He had his latchkey ready, and inserted it with the ease of long practice. The hall was dark. The bathroom and kitchen doors faced him, and they were shut. The sitting-room door, which was on his right, was open, but no light came from it, the velvet curtains being drawn and the room in darkness. The bedroom door on the left was shut. The place reeked of spirits.
    Peterson put on the hall light, and was immediately startled out of his accustomed routine. Instead of entering the kitchen he remained where he was, his hand just dropped from the switch and his eyes fixed upon the floor. Mr. Craddock had a soul above linoleum. The floor was of a light parquet, with a yellow and blue Chinese rug laid across it. And across the parquet and the yellow and blue of the rug were the marks of a naked foot printed in blood.
    You can’t mistake a bloodstain, try how you will. Peterson would have been very glad of anything that would have explained those marks away. If you were own man to a gentleman like Mr. Craddock, there were things you had to put up with, and things that were best not talked about, but you didn’t reckon on bloodstained footprints, no, that you didn’t.
    He went quickly over to the bedroom door, tapped lightly, and looked in. The curtains here were of chintz, and the light came through them, a tempered yellowish light, but enough to show that the bed had not been slept in, that it was in fact as he had left it, neatly turned down, with Mr. Craddock’s rather loud pyjamas laid out across the foot. Mr. Craddock’s taste in pyjamas was one of the subjects upon which Peterson exercised a wise discretion.
    He turned back, still not greatly alarmed, because he had before now found Mr. Craddock on the sofa, or even—though this had only happened once—upon the floor. He switched on the sitting-room light, and for a moment his only thought was that Mr. Craddock had done it again. And done it properly this time. The little table on which he had set out the drinks had been pushed over, and a chair was overturned. Broken glass too—well, that would account for the blood. There’d been a girl here, and she’d cut her foot. Nasty stuff, broken glass. Lord—what a blind it must have been! And Mr. Craddock dead to the world, sprawling there on the floor with the bits of a smashed decanter all about him.
    With a slight reproving click of the tongue, Peterson stepped forward. And then he saw the revolver—Mr. Craddock’s own revolver, the one he kept in the second drawer of his writing-table. And it lay on the hearth-rug a couple of yards away from Mr. Craddock’s outstretched left hand. And Mr. Craddock lay in a pool of blood. Mr. Craddock was dead.
    The