Barbara looked at him quickly. “Why should I?” she returned swiftly. “I mean—” She hesitated and corrected herself. “Why should you think I might?”
“I don’t know. You were very upset this morning, and it occurred to me that you might have had bad news and were acting on the spur of the moment; and perhaps when you had thought it over, you might—” He broke off meaningly.
Barbara seemed strangely ill at ease. She did not reply at once to Alec’s unspoken question, but twisted her wisp of a handkerchief between her fingers with nervous gestures that were curiously out of place in this usually uncommonly self-possessed young person.
“Oh, I don’t know what to say,” she replied at last, in low, hurried tones. “I can’t tell you anything at present, Alec. I may have acted too much on the spur of the moment. I don’t know. Come and see me when we get back from the Mertons’ next month. I shall have to think things over.”
“And you won’t tell me what the trouble was, dear?”
“No, I can’t. Please don’t ask me that, Alec. You see, that isn’t really my secret. No, I can’t possibly tell you!”
“All right. But—but you do love me, don’t you?”
Barbara laid her hand on his arm with a swift, caressing movement. “It wasn’t anything to do with that, old boy,” she said softly. “Come and see me next month. I think—I think I might have changed my mind again by then. No, Alec! You mustn’t! Anyhow, not here of all places. Perhaps I’ll let you once—just a tiny one!—before we go; but not unless you’re good. Besides, I’ve got to run in and pack now. We’re catching the two forty-one, and Mother will be waiting for me.”
She gave his hand a sudden squeeze and turned towards the house.
“That was a bit of luck, meeting her out here!” murmured Alec raptly to himself as he watched her go. Wherein he was not altogether correct in his statement of fact; for as the lady had come into the garden for that express purpose, the subsequent meeting might be said to be due rather to good generalship than good luck.
It was therefore a remarkably jubilant Watson who returned blithely to the library to find his Sherlock sitting solemnly in the chair before the big writing table and staring hard at the chimneypiece.
In spite of himself he shivered slightly. “Ugh, you ghoulish brute!” he exclaimed.
Roger looked at him abstractedly. “What’s up?”
“Well, I can’t say that I should like to sit in that particular chair just yet awhile.”
“I’m glad you’ve come back,” Roger said, rising slowly to his feet. “I’ve just had a pretty curious idea, and I’m going to test it. The chances are several million to one against it coming off, but if it does⸺! Well, I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do!”
He had spoken so seriously that Alec gaped at him in surprise. “Good Lord, what’s up now?” he asked.
“Well, I won’t say in so many words,” Roger replied slowly, “because it’s really too fantastic. But it’s to do with the breaking of that second vase. You remember I said that in order for it to have smashed like that it must have been struck extraordinarily hard by some mysterious object. It’s just occurred to me what that object might possibly have been.”
He walked across to where the chair was still standing in front of the fireplace and stepped up on to it. Then, with a glance towards the chair he had just left, he began to examine the woodwork at the back of the chimneypiece. Alec watched him in silence. Suddenly he bent forward with close attention and prodded a finger at the panel; and Alec noticed that his face had gone very pale.
He turned and descended, a little unsteadily, from the chair. “My hat, but I was right!” he exclaimed softly, staring at Alec with raised eyebrows. “That second vase was smashed by a bullet! You’ll find its mark just behind that little pillar on the left there.”
VIII
Mr. Sheringham Becomes Startling
For a moment there was silence between the two. Then:
“Great Scott!” Alec remarked. “Absolutely certain?”
“Absolutely. It’s a bullet mark all right. The bullet isn’t there, but it must have just embedded itself in the wood and been dug out with a penknife. You can see the marks of the blade round the hole. Get up and have a look.”
Alec stepped on to the chair and felt the hole in the wood with a large forefinger. “Couldn’t be an old mark, could it?” he asked, examining it curiously. “Some of this panelling’s been pretty well knocked about.”
“No; I thought of that. An old hole would have the edges more or less smoothed down; those are quite jagged and splintery. And where the knife’s cut the wood away the surface is quite different to the rest. Not so dark. No; that mark’s a recent one, all right.”
Alec got down from the chair. “What do you make of it?” he asked abruptly.
“I’m not sure,” said Roger slowly. “It means rather a drastic rearrangement of our ideas, doesn’t it? But I’ll tell you one highly important fact, and that is that a line from this mark through the middle of the ring in the dust leads straight to the chair in front of the writing table. That seems to me jolly significant. I tell you what. Let’s go out on to the lawn and talk it over. We don’t want to stay in here too long in any case.”
He carefully replaced the chair on the hearthrug in its proper position and walked out into the garden. Alec dutifully followed, and they made for the cedar tree once more.
“Go on,” said the latter when they were seated. “This is going to be interesting.”
Roger frowned abstractedly. He was enjoying himself hugely. With his capacity for throwing himself heart and soul into whatever he happened to be doing at the moment,
