“You must make him pay. Now do, Bob, dear. It breaks my heart to see you worried.” “I will make him,” Bob said after a minute’s pause, and added savagely, his nerves racked by wife, babies, and bills, “I’ll get it out of him by fair means or foul.” Barbara cried out, before she kissed him and gave the final pull to his coat at the back: “How can you talk in that dreadful way? One would think you meant to murder the man.” At that moment Maria came out of the dining room with the breakfast tray. Well, in the evening Bob went to the Inn and found Murphy at home. He asked him bluntly to pay back the twenty pounds, and Murphy said airily that it was ridiculous--a joke on Bob’s part--he hadn’t twenty pence in the world. This led to words. In the thick of the row there was a knock at Murphy’s door and he left the room to open it. Piety heard the murmur of voices--Murphy’s and another which he did not recognize. Then he heard a movement like a sharp scuffle of feet on the boards, heard a piercing cry and a heavy fall, and the quick, frightened patter of feet on the stairs. That was all. When he rushed into the little passage both of the outer doors were open, and Murphy was lying stone-dead just inside the “set.” There was the handle of a queer-looking knife sticking up from his waistcoat, and his blood had poured out in a great dark pool in which the Syrian curtains that draped the archway of the passage were dabbled. Bob tried to raise the body. But the Irishman had been a burly fellow, and he only succeeded in spattering himself with blood. We all heard that fearful scream of poor Murphy’s; it even pierced the oak, for Kinsman, who had been shut away in his rooms with Sophia Dominy, came rushing upstairs, followed by the girl. I had the set opposite Murphy’s on the second floor, so I was first on the spot.