In the Night by R. Gorell Barnes published by Longmans, Green and Co., 1917 CONTENTS Foreword I. At the Rose and Crown II. Philip and Evelyn III. Foul Play IV. A Mystery in the Night V. Upstairs VI. New Lights VII. Fears and Discoveries VIII. The Broken Window IX. Evelyn and Philip X. The Little Dancing Girl XI. A Chain of Confusion XII. Out of the Darkness XIII. How It Happened XIV. Sight at Last To Lt. Vivian Morse FOREWORD This tale of mystery must be regarded as a diversion from war, a word which does not occur in its pages. It was planned in a base-hospital in France, and written during recovery at home; if it serves to interest for an hour or two those similarly placed and those still in the trenches, its existence is amply justified. It tries, at any rate, to deal fairly with its readers, who are not called upon to admire clevernesses of deduction they are prevented from performing for themselves. Nothing is more irritating, and more common, in tales of the investigation of crime, than to find such sentences as “the great detective rose from his knees and put away his magnifying-glass with a self-satisfied air,” and not be told what he saw to make him self-satisfied. In the following pages, therefore, every essential fact is related as it is discovered and readers are, as far as possible, given the eyes of the investigators and equal opportunities with them of arriving at the truth. R. G. B. CHAPTER I At the Rose and Crown The quiet of a fine summer evening was falling on the little village of Salting; the fields were slowly emptying as the dusk settled down, and the bar of the Rose and Crown was steadily filling with the heavy-footed, silent-minded labourers. Salting lies a mile or two away from a branch-line which ends with apparent inconsequence at a sleepy town some ten miles further; and the pursuits of its inhabitants, and in consequence their conversation, range eternally round the topics of the season and the crops and the simple, but not necessarily good-natured, personalities concerning one another. Nor is it a social district in the sense in which so many English neighbourhoods are, galvanized sporadically into an appearance of life by the moneyed activities of the upper classes. There are no small gentry, only farmers of varying prosperity; there is only one large estate, and though the great house which is hidden in the woods of it had been built for twenty-five years or more, it had never become in any sense part of the life of the place.