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Cook having the bell rung when she is ready.”
“And now I feel like a school boy!” Harry rushed out.
They had all got up, and, as they went towards the door, Lady Marway said: “At any rate, he does contrive to keep us alive.”
“Barely,” answered Marjory. “I’m famished. But he stood up to you, Geoffrey.”
“Yes, didn’t he?” Half-closing her mouth, Helen could coo in her throat like a pigeon.
“He did his best,” said Geoffrey. “But you haven’t heard the end of all this yet. You wait!”
“Don’t you think you should let it rest?” suggested Lady Marway.
“Let it rest! Now that I have him and can document the case? We’ll have some fun out of this. I see it coming. Harry’s ghost!”
Helen turned in the door of the dining-room and in a deep, slow voice said, “What if it’s your ghost?”
She said it very well, and there was just a second before Geoffrey laughed.

Chapter Two
W
hile they were at dinner, Mairi, the parlour-maid, came into the empty sitting-room with a duster in her hand. As she faced the room, listening, she closed the door behind her very softly. The air of tension in her attitude heightened the colour in her cheeks. She was dark, with brown eyes. “A dark, pretty country girl,” was how a visitor remembered her in London. She was twenty-one, the same age as Helen. But where Helen might fly, Mairi would dive. She now listened naturally, every instinct alert, and not for one thing but for everything.
Opposite her, across the room, was the gun-room door, with the fireplace to the right of it. The wall on her left hand was to the back of the house, and through its window, which faced north, could be seen in daylight the green-painted larder where the stags were hung up, a corner of the garage, and the “back road” that gave on pony tracks into the forest. A brown curtain, hanging to just below the sill, covered the window at the moment. Mairi’s eyes rested on it, then she began gathering the glasses and cleaning up the ash-trays.
The room was furnished simply and in good taste, with some comfortable armchairs, a writing-desk, and a mahogany bookcase—the bottom half with doors. A bracket lamp in the wall by the bookcase was usually turned low—until required in that part of the room for reading or writing. It was of the same kind as the standard lamp, which with its incandescent mantle and bulbous opaque white globe stood over towards the fireplace. The antlers above the gun-room door and the spotted cannibal trout in its glass case above the hall door somehow did not obtrude. A spray of red autumn berries in a brown earthenware jar suitably suggested the time of year.
Mairi moved about deftly, but she still kept listening, and at last, hearing a sound in the gun-room, she stood still so suddenly that her very nostrils seemed to scent the sound, like a hind’s. It came nearer. She glanced away from it towards the hall door, then, going to the gun-room door, calmly opened it.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said coolly.
“Yes,” said Alick.
As he approached her, she stepped back. “What do you want?”
He came into the doorway, a rifle and an oiled rag in his hand, glanced round the room and then looked at Mairi.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
The dry searching satire came out of an expressionless face, except for the eyes, and they were, for so big a man, rather small. He was as tall as Geoffrey, but with the powerful shoulders and lean flanks of the “heavy”athlete. He walked lightly and could probably be as quick on his feet as a cat. His face was full, without being fleshy, and his eyes, of a greeny blue, could be penetratingly steadfast, as indeed they were now. This still waiting quality in him defeated Mairi, and despite herself concern crept into her voice when she repeated, “What do you want?”
“To tell the