ed? Did somebody send for you? Is that what brought you here?"

Mrs. Pendleton shook her head, embarrassed in her grief. She remembered
that she wished to keep the object of her visit secret from her younger
brother, and she could not very well disclose the truth then.

"Not exactly," she replied, a trifle incoherently. "I wanted to see Robert
again before I returned to London in the morning. So we motored over after
dinner, and found him--dead." Fresh tears broke from her.

Austin Turold wandered around the room quickly and nervously, then drew
Dr. Ravenshaw to the door with a glance. "I should like to go upstairs
before the police come," he whispered.

Dr. Ravenshaw nodded, and they went upstairs together. The shattered door
creaked open to their touch, revealing the lighted interior and the dead
man prone on the floor. Austin approached his brother's corpse, eyed it
shudderingly, and turned away. Then he stooped to look at the small
revolver lying alongside, but did not touch it. Again he bent over the
corpse, this time with more composure in his glance.

The object on which the outstretched arms rested was an old Dutch hood
clock, which had fallen or been dragged from a niche in the wall, and lay
face uppermost, the glass case open and smashed, the hands: stopped at the
hour of half-past nine. It was a clock of the seventeenth century, of a
design still to be found occasionally in old English houses. A landscape
scene was painted in the arch above the dial, showing the moon above a
wood, in a sky crowded with stars. The moon was depicted as a human face,
with eyes which moved in response to the swing of the pendulum. But the
pendulum was motionless, and the goggle eyes of the mechanism stared up
almost reproachfully, as though calling upon the two men to rescue it from
such an undignified position. At the bottom of the dial appeared the name
of Jan Fromantel, the famous Dutch clockmaker, and underneath was an
inscription in German lettering--

"Every tick that I do give
Cuts short the time you have to live.
Praise thy Maker, mend thy ways,
Till Death, the thief, shall steal thy days."

"Look at the blood!" said Austin Turold, pointing to a streak of blood on
the large white dial. "How did it happen?"

"I know very little more than yourself. Your sister called at my house
about an hour ago and asked me to accompany her here. She wished to see
your brother on some private business, and she w