antly. Give
him a little work which set him in the limelight as the leader of the
Chorus, and nothing could keep down his spirits. He took a sheet of
foolscap, a blotting pad, a heavy inkstand, and a quill pen--Sir
Chichester never used anything but a quill pen--to the big table in the
middle of the hall, and wrote in a fair, round hand:

"The case of Mrs. Croyle."

and looked at his work and thought it good.

"It looks quite like a _cause celebre_, doesn't it?" he said buoyantly.
But he caught Martin Hillyard's eye, and recovered his more becoming
despondency. Harry Luttrell came in as the baronet settled once more to
his task. He laid a shining key upon the table and said:

"I found this upon the lawn. It looked as if it might be the key of Mrs.
Croyle's room."

It was undoubtedly the key of a door. "We'll find out," said the
baronet. Harper was sent for and commissioned to inquire. He returned in
a few minutes.

"Yes, sir, it is the key of Mrs. Croyle's room." He laid it upon the
table and went out of the room.

"I suppose it is then," said Harry Luttrell. "But I am a little
puzzled."

"Oh?"

"It wasn't lying beneath Mrs. Croyle's window as one might have
expected. But at the east side of the house, below the corridor, and
almost in front of the glass door of the library."

Both of his hearers were disturbed. Sir Chichester took up the key, and
twisted it this way and that, till it flashed like a point of fire in
the sunlight; as though under such giddy work it would yield up its
secret for the sake of peace. He flung it on the table again, where it
rattled and lay still.

"I can't make head or tail of it," Sir Chichester cried. Martin Hillyard
opened his mouth to speak and thought better of it. He could not falter
in his belief that Stella had destroyed herself. The picture of her that
morning in Surrey, with the lamps burning in her room and the bed
untouched, was too vivid in his memory. What she had tried to do two
years ago, she had found the courage to do to-day.

That was sure. But it was not all. There was some one in the shadows who
meant harm, more harm than was already accomplished. There was
malevolence at work. The discovery of the key in that position far from
Stella's window assured him of it. The aspect of the key itself as it
lay upon the table made the assurance still more sure. But whom was this
malevolence to hurt? And how? At what moment would the hand behind the
curtain strike?