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Mark. By George! I don’t understand you! Here: what’s so incredible about this story? What you’ve told us already isn’t anything very wild; bad, if you like, or devilish, or—but not out of the way. It’s plain murder. What’s so incredible about the rest of it?”
    “That a long-dead woman,” said Mark, calmly, “might still be alive.”
    “What damned nonsense…!”
    “No, I’m absolutely sane,” Mark told him, nodding calmly. “Feel my pulse; give me a crack across the knee and watch my leg jump. I don’t believe it, naturally—any more than I believe Lucy had anything to do with it. There are two theories, both impossible. I only tell you it’s a stray idea that’s got stuck in the back of my mind, so I want to drag it out and laugh at it. But, if I told you now, God knows what you’d get to thinking. … Will you help me open that crypt first?”
    “Yes,” said Stevens.
    “What about you, Part?”
    “I haven’t come three thousand miles to back out now,” the doctor grunted. “But understand: you’re not going to keep up this mumbo-jumbo once I’ve done the business. By George! you’re not! I wonder how Edith—” There was a flash of anger in his stolid brown eyes, but he became affable as Mark filled his glass for the third time. “How do we open this crypt?”
    Mark was brisk again. “Good! Good! It’s not a hard job, but it’ll require plenty of time and muscle and elbow grease. It’ll need four men—the fourth is Henderson, who can be trusted and who’s right in his element at this sort of work. He’s the only one in the house now. Besides, his and Mrs. H’s living-quarters are right beside the path going to the crypt: we couldn’t disturb a stone without his knowing it afterwards by one look. … All the rest of ’em I’ve got rid of on one pretext or another; you couldn’t as much as shuffle a couple of stones—let alone what we’ve got to do—without everybody at the back of the house hearing it. As for the work…”
    Stevens thought of the scene. At the rear of the long, low grey house there ran out a broad and straight path laid out in crazy-paving with concrete between the stones. On either side was a sunken garden. Beyond the gardens the path was lined with elm trees, and it terminated, some sixty yards from the house, in a small private chapel which had been shut up for more than a century and a half. Not far in front of the chapel, and to the left of the path as you walked down it, was a small house where the Despards had once “kept” a clergyman. The Hendersons lived there now. Stevens had heard that the entrance to the crypt (of which no sign was visible) was somewhere under the crazy-paving before the chapel door. Mark explained it now.
    “About seven square feet of paving will have to come up,” he said. “And, since we have to work in a hurry, there’ll be a lot of breaking. We’ll get a dozen steel wedges—long ones—into the concrete between the stones, and drive them in as far as they’ll go, and then knock them to one side. That’ll lift and split most of the joinings. Then we crack it all over with a sledge-hammer, and we can take it up in pieces. Under that there’s gravel and soil; six inches or so. Under that there’s a flat stone that covers the hole down into the place. The stone’s six feet by four, and, I warn you, it weighs between fifteen and eighteen hundred pounds. The heaviest job will be to get bars under it and lever it up on its end. Then we go down the stairs. I know it sounds like a lot of work…”
    “It’s a lot of work, all right,” grunted Partington, and slapped his knees. “Let’s get down to it, then. And look here: you don’t want anybody to know about this, do you? After we make all that mess, do you think we can get it back afterwards so that nobody will know it’s been disturbed?”
    “Not altogether, no. Anybody with an eye for it, like Henderson or myself, would see it. But I doubt whether