Nor," went on Antony, "can you say, 'This is my friend Mr. Gillingham,
who is staying with you. We were just going to have a game of bowls.'"

"Yes, it's dashed difficult. I don't know what to say. I've been rather
forgetting about Mark." He wandered over to the window and looked out on
to the lawns. There was a gardener clipping the grass edges. No reason
why the lawn should be untidy just because the master of the house had
disappeared. It was going to be a hot day again. Dash it, of course he
had forgotten Mark. How could he think of him as an escaped murderer,
a fugitive from justice, when everything was going on just as it did
yesterday, and the sun was shining just as it did when they all drove
off to their golf, only twenty-four hours ago? How could he help feeling
that this was not real tragedy, but merely a jolly kind of detective
game that he and Antony were playing?

He turned back to his friend.

"All the same," he said, "you wanted to find the passage, and now you've
found it. Aren't you going into it at all?"

Antony took his arm.

"Let's go outside again," he said. "We can't go into it now, anyhow.
It's too risky, with Cayley about. Bill, I feel like you--just a little
bit frightened. But what I'm frightened of I don't quite know. Anyway,
you want to go on with it, don't you?"

"Yes," said Bill firmly. "We must."

"Then we'll explore the passage this afternoon, if we get the chance.
And if we don't get the chance, then we'll try it to-night."

They walked across the hall and out into the sunlight again.

"Do you really think we might find Mark hiding there?" asked Bill.

"It's possible," said Antony. "Either Mark or--" He pulled himself up
quickly. "No," he murmured to himself, "I won't let myself think that
not yet, anyway. It's too horrible."

CHAPTER XII. A Shadow on the Wall

In the twenty hours or so at his disposal Inspector Birch had been busy.
He had telegraphed to London a complete description of Mark in the brown
flannel suit which he had last been seen wearing; he had made inquiries
at Stanton as to whether anybody answering to this description had
been seen leaving by the 4.20; and though the evidence which had been
volunteered to him had been inconclusive, it made it possible that
Mark had indeed caught that train, and had arrived in London before the
police at the other end had been ready to receive him. But the fact that
it was market-day at Stanton, and that the little