I looked about me to see if there was anything unusual which might catch the eye. A scrap of paper, a bottle, a phial, a syringe--something which might have been used as a weapon. I could detect no sign of injury on Vernon's person; no bruise upon his head or face; no flow of blood. Stooping over him, I smelt his lips. There are certain poisons the scent of which is unmistakable, the odour of some of those whose effect is the most rapid lingers long after death has intervened. I have a keen sense of smell, but about the neighbourhood of Decimus Vernon's mouth there was no odour of any sort or kind. As I rose, there was the sound of some one entering the room beyond. "Decimus?" The voice was a woman's. I turned. Lilian Trowbridge was standing at the bedroom door. We exchanged stares, apparently startled by each other's appearance into momentary speechlessness. She seemed to be in a tremor of excitement. Her lips were parted. Her big, black eyes seemed to scorch my countenance. She leaned with one hand against the side of the door, as if seeking for support to enable her to stand while she regained her breath. "Mr. Benham--You! Where is Decimus? I wish to speak to him." Her unexpected entry had caused me to lose my presence of mind. The violence of her manner did not assist me in regaining it. I stumbled in my speech. "If you will come with me into the other room, I will give you an explanation." I made an awkward movement forward, my impulse being to conceal from her what was lying on the floor. She detecting my uneasiness, perceiving there was something which I would conceal, swept into the room, straight to where Vernon lay. "Decimus! Decimus!" She called to him. Had the tone in which she spoke, then, been in her voice when she enacted her parts in the dramas of the mimic stage, her audiences would have had no cause to complain that she was wooden. She turned to me, as if at a loss to comprehend her lover's silence. "Is he sleeping?" I was silent. Then, with a little gasp, "Is he dead?" I still made no reply. She read my meaning rightly. Even from where I was standing, I could see her bosom rise and fall. She threw out both her arms in front of her. "I am glad!" she cried, "I am glad that he is dead!" She took me, to say the least of it, aback. "Why should you be glad?" "Why? Because, now, she will not have him!" I had forgotten, for the instant, what Crampton had spluttered out upon the doorstep. Her words recalled it to my mind. "Don't you know that he lied to me, and I believed his lies." She turned to Vernon with a gesture of scorn so frenzied, so intense, that it might almost have made the dead man writhe. "Now, at any rate, if he does not marry me, he will marry no one else."