house, and steps ascending to a balcony halfway up. Ahead and beyond, the driveway — here snow-crusted like the lawns — divided into three branches. One ran round the back of the house, a second down over a dim slope where he could see faintly an avenue of evergreens, and a third curved out to the left towards the low roofs of what seemed to be stables. It was from this direction..
Again the dog's howl rose, with a note that was like anguish.
'Down!' came a voice from far away. 'Down! Tempest! Good dog! Down!'
The next sound Bennett heard he thought for a moment might be the dog again. But it was human. It was a cry such as he had never heard, coming faintly from over the slope of the lawn towards the rear.
In his half-drugged stage he had a feeling of almost physical sickness. But he ran to the end of the porte- cochere and peered out. He could see the stables now. In a cobbled courtyard before them he saw the figure of a man, in a groom's brown gaiters and corduroy coat, who was gripping the bridles of two frightened saddle-horses and soothing them as they began to clatter on the cobbles. The groom's voice, the same voice that had spoken to the dog, rose above the snorting and champing:
'Sir! Sir! Where are you? Is anything-?'
The other voice answered faintly, as though it said something like, 'Here!' As he tried to follow the direction of that sound, Bennett recognized something from a description. He recognized the narrow avenue of evergreens curving down to broaden into a big circular coppice of trees, to the pavilion called the Queen's Mirror. And he thought he recognized the voice of John Bohun. That was when he began to run.
His shoes were already soaked and freezing in any case, and the crust of snow was only half an inch deep. One single line of tracks led before him down the slope to the evergreens. They were fresh tracks, he could see by their new featheriness, made only a very short time before. He followed them along the path, thirty odd feet between the evergreens, and emerged into the ragged coppice. It was impossible to see anything clearly except the dull white of the pavilion, which stood in the middle of a snow-crusted clearing measuring half an acre. In a square about it, extending out about sixty feet with the pavilion in the center, ran a low marble coping. A higher stone pathway cut through it to the open door of the low marble house. The line of tracks went up to that front door. But no tracks came out.
A figure appeared in that doorway, with such eerie suddenness that Bennett stopped dead; his heart was knocking and his throat felt raw. The figure was a dark blur against the gray. It put one arm over its eyes and leaned the arm rockily, like a hurt child, against the doorpost. Bennett heard it sob.
As he stepped forward, his foot crackled in the snow and the figure looked up. 'Who's there?' said John Bohun's voice, going suddenly high. 'Who-?”
As though he were fiercely straightening himself, he came a little out of the shadow in the doorway. Even at that great distance in the half-light Bennett could see the narrow rounded outline of riding-breeches; but the face under the low-drawn cap was a blur, although it seemed to be shaking. Question and answer echoed thinly across the clearing. Far away Bennett could hear the dog howling again.
'I've just got here,' he said. 'I — what — '
'Come here,' said Bohun.
Bennett ran obliquely across the clearing. He did not follow the footsteps that went up and across the stone path to the door. He saw the sixty feet of flat snow-covered space that surrounded the pavilion, and thought it was a lawn. His foot had almost touched the low coping when Bohun spoke again.
'Don't step on that!' he cried, his voice breaking. `Don't step on that, you damned fool. It's thin ice. That's the lake. You'll go through —'
Jerking back, Bennett altered his direction.. He stumbled up the path, breathing hard, and then up the three steps at the end of it which led to the door.
'She's dead,' said Bohun.
In the silence they heard roused sparrows shrilling and bickering, and one fluttered across from under the eaves. Bohun's slow-drawn breath turned to smoke in the air; his lips hardly moved. His eyes were fixed with a dull intensity on Bennett's face, and his cheeks looked sunken.
'Do you hear me?' he cried. He lifted a riding-crop and slashed it across the doorpost. 'I tell, you Marcia's dead! I've just found her. What's the matter with you? Can't you say something? Dead. Her head-her head is all-'
He looked at sticky fingers, and his shoulders trembled.
'Don't you believe me? Go in and look. My God, the loveliest woman that ever lived, all — all — go and see. They killed her, that's what they did! Somebody killed her. She fought. She would. Dear Marcia. It was no good. She couldn't live. Nothing of mine-ever stays. We were to go riding this morning, before anybody was up. I came out here and…'
Bennett was trying to fight down a physical nausea.
'But,' he said, 'what's she doing here? In this place, I mean?'
The other looked at him dully. 'Oh, no,',' he said at last, as though his vacant mind had found an elusive fact. 'You don't know, do you? You weren't there. No. Well, she insisted on sleeping here: all the time she was with us. That was like Marcia. Oh, everything was like Marcia. But why should she want to stay here? I wouldn't have let her. But I wasn't here to stop it… '
'Sir!' called a low, rather hoarse voice from across the clearing. They saw the groom craning his neck and gesticulating. 'Sir. Wot is it? Was it you that yelled, sir? I saw you go in, and then-'
'Go back,' said Bohun. 'Go back, I tell you!' he snarled, as the other hesitated. 'I don't need you. I don't need anybody.'
He sat down slowly on the top step, and put his head in his hands.
Bennett moved past him. He knew without self-illusion that he was afraid to go in there that he felt empty and shaken at facing the dark, but it had to be done. He cursed himself because his right hand trembled; and he seized his own wrist with the other hand, idiotically.
'Are there,' he said, 'are there any lights?'
'lights?' repeated Bohun, after a pause. 'In? — Oh. Oh, yes. Certainly. Electric lights. Funny. I forgot to turn on lights; forgot all about it. Funny. Ho ho! I '
The jump in his voice made Bennett hurry inside.
So far as he could tell in almost complete darkness, he was in a little anteroom which smelt of old wood and musty silks; but there was a newer perfume trailing through. It brought the face of Marcia Tait too vividly before his mind. He did not, of course, believe she was really dead. That vital loveliness the hand you had touched, the mouth you had (if only once) kissed, and then damned her for making a fool of you — these things did not suddenly dwindle to the flat lines of a drawing, or the wax stillness of a dummy in a coffin. Impossible. She was here, she was all about, palpable even in absence; and so was the flame. But he felt a growing sense of emptiness. Groping in the wall to the left, hurriedly, he found a door open. Inside that, he groped after an electric switch, found one, and hesitated a second before he turned it on…
Nothing. Nothing, when the light went on.
He was in a museum, or a drawing-room — a real drawing-room — of the Stuart times. Nothing had changed, except that the satin had frayed, the colors faded and gone dry. There were the three high arched windows with their square panes. There was the carven fireplace with its blackened stone hood, the floor laid out in chequered squares of black-and-white marble. And it was lit by candle-flames slowly wavering and shifting in brass candelabra on the, walls. So subtly had the illusion been managed that for second Bennett doubted his own sense, and half- expected not to find an electric switch in the wall when he looked. There was suggestion, too, in a disarranged chair with the Stuart arms worked into its oak filigree, in the ashes of a small fire that had gone out. There was a tall door at the rear of the room. When he opened it on darkness, he hesitated still more before the switch clicked.
Only two candelabra burned here, and the shadows were thick. He saw a shadow of the tall bedstead with its red canopy, the dull gleams in many mirrors of a small square room, and then he saw her.
In one stumbling rush he blundered over to make sure. It was true. She was dead. She had been dead for many hours, for she was stone cold: that was what brought home the shock to him most vividly.
Backing away to the middle of the room, he tried to keep himself calm and sensible. It was still impossible. She lay doubled up on the floor between the fireplace and the foot of the bed. In the same wall as the bed, and just across the room from the fireplace, rose an enormous square-paned window through which the gray light fell across
