with hands splayed for the grapple. The room had a strange
stillness; in spite of himself he held his breath to listen for Tom
Mowbray's breathing. His right arm brushed the hilt of his
sheath-knife as he stood, tense and listening. There was no sound of
breathing, but there was something.

It was like the slow tick of a very quiet clock, measured and
persistent. He could not make it out.

"Mowbray!" he called once more, and the only answer was that
pat-a-pat that became audible again when he ceased to call.

"I bet I'll wake you," he said, and stepped forward feeling before
him with his hands. They found the surface of a table, struck and
knocked over a glass that stood upon it, and found a box of matches.
"Ah!" grunted Goodwin triumphantly.

The match-flame languished ere it stood steady and let the room be
seen. Goodwin had passed the bed and was standing with his back to
it. With the match in his fingers and his eyes dazzled by its light,
he turned and approached it. The face of Mowbray showed wide-open
eyes at him from the pillow. The bedclothes lay across his chest; one
arm hung over the edge of the bed with the hand loose and limp. And
above his neck his night-clothes and the linen of the bed were sodden
and dreadful with blood that had flowed from a frightful wound in the
throat. What had sounded like the ticking of a clock was now the
noise of its dripping. "Drip!" it went; "drip-drip!"

The match-flame stung his fingers and went out.

"Hell!" cried Goodwin, and out of the darkness panic swooped on him.

There was a moment when he tried to find the door and could not,
alone in the blackness of the room with the murdered man. He caught
at himself desperately to save himself from screaming, and found the
matchbox was in his hand. He failed to light two matches, standing
off the lunatic terror that threatened him.

Somewhere out of sight he knew that Tom Mowbray's eyes were open. The
third match fired and he had the door by the handle. It restored him
like a grip of a friendly hand.

He was able to pause in the door while the match burned and his mind
raced. There leaped to the eye of his imagination the two stricken
figures he had seen slinking from the house, the weeping of the
woman, the muffled tap of the man's crutch. There followed, in an
inevitable sequence, the memory of them in their torment as they sat
at meat with Tom Mowbray.

"I wonder which o' them done it?" he thought, and shuddered. Wh