house he saw that the middle window was thrown high
and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and
dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the
house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up
the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards'
library.

Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room,
sparsely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that
glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the
gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On
a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned,
crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden
rug.

Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the
bowl and the white mass of crushed flowers, and then something else,
something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw
it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.

One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would
hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the
smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat,
gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures
swayed back and forth.

"Who's there?" Neil cried.

Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to, for just then the two men who
seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the
uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that
they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man
was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung
limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip
of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped
to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with
the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was
Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.

As Neil looked Brady dropped on his knees beside the Colonel, felt for
his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand
pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to
his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself,
and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him
without surprise, i