“Do you mind if I look round the shelves?” he asked Sylvia. “I’ve never been in this place before, you know. Your uncle seems to have collected a lot of specimens.” Sylvia accompanied him in his tour of inspection; but she could throw little light on the various objects. “Hardly anything’s labelled, as you see,” she pointed out. “Once or twice I offered to label them all for Uncle Roger; for it seems so silly to have a lot of things there with no explanation, doesn’t it?” They moved down the room, scanning the shelves. Ardsley remained near the door, grimly aloof from the rest of the group. Arthur hovered uncertainly about the room, evidently keeping his eye on the visitors as though troubled by suspicions of their motives. “This is a dreadful business about my uncles,” Sylvia said in a low voice, when she and Wendover had moved away from the others. “I was terribly shocked when I got back here and heard what had happened. I’m not going to pretend I was very fond of either of them—they always seemed to me different from the rest of us, somehow—but I liked them in a way; and it was horrible to come back and find that while I’d been enjoying myself in the afternoon, they’d been . . .” She hesitated, evidently disliking the word—“murdered.” Wendover nodded understandingly. He quite appreciated her feelings. Neither of the dead men had been of the type that would attract the admiration or even the respect of a girl like Sylvia. Their disappearance would leave no real gap in her world. But after all, they were relations of hers and the sudden incursion of violence and death into her family was bound to leave its impression. “You’re not frightened, are you?” he asked. “No, of course not. But it seems a frightful affair, doesn’t it? It leaves one dazed, somehow—like a bad dream. Only one doesn’t wake up. We all seem to be going about trying to persuade ourselves that the world’s just the same as ever; but somehow I don’t seem to succeed. It’s too horrible for that.” Wendover did his best to soothe her. Behind the pretence of indifference he could see that she was badly shaken. Quite obviously she was trying to minimise her feelings so as not to make him uncomfortable. They continued their tour of the collection, and she tried to interest herself in explaining to him the various objects in it. When they had completed their inspection, Wendover suppressed a sigh of relief. “Well,” he said to himself, “there are no poisoned arrows there, at any rate. This pot of stuff seems to be the only danger-point in the whole lot.”