"I didn't know." "Well, it was, and the funny thing is that I was there at the time. I used to go out with the dog for a cigarette when they turned in; last night I was foolish enough to fall asleep in a chair on the lawn. I had been playing tennis all the afternoon, and had a long bike-ride both ways. Well, all I know is that I woke up thinking I'd been shot; and there was my aunt with a revolver she insists on carrying--and poor Muggins as dead as a door-nail." "Did she say it was an accident?" "She behaved as if it had been; she was all over the poor dead brute." "Rather a savage dog, wasn't it?" "I never thought so. But the General had no use for him--and no wonder! Did he tell you he had bitten him in the shoulder?" "No." "Well, he did, only the other day. But that's the old General all over. He never told me till the dog was dead. I shouldn't be surprised if----" "Yes?" "----if my aunt hadn't been in it somehow. Poor old Muggins was such a bone between them!" "You don't suppose he'd ended by turning on her?" "Hardly. He was like a kitten with her, poor brute!" Another cigarette was lighted; more inhaling went on unchecked. "Was Mrs. Dysone by herself out there--but for you?" "Well--yes." "Does that mean she wasn't?" "Upon my word, I don't know!" said young Paley, frankly. "It sounds most awful rot, but just for a moment I thought I saw somebody in a sort of surplice affair. But I can only swear to Aunt Essie, and she was in her dressing-gown, and it wasn't white." Dollar did not go to bed at all. He sat first at one window, watching the black trees turn blue, and eventually a variety of sunny greens; then at the other, staring down at the pretty scene of a deed ugly in itself, but uglier in the peculiar quality of its mystery. A dog; only a dog, this time; but the woman's own dog! There were two new sods on the place where he supposed it had lain withering.... But who or what was it that these young men had seen--the one the General had told him about, and this obviously truthful lad whom he himself had questioned? "Brown devils in flowing robes" was perhaps only the old soldier's picturesque phrase; they might have turned brown in his Indian mind; but what of Jim Paley's "somebody in a sort of surplice affair"? Was that "body" brown as well? In the wood of worse omen the gay little birds tuned up to deaf ears at the open window. And a cynical soloist went so far as to start saying, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" in a liquid contralto. But a little sharp shot, fired two nights and a day before, was the only sound to get across the spare-room window-sill.... The bathroom was next door; in that physically admirable house there was boiling hot water at six o'clock in the morning; the servants made tea when they heard it running; and the garden before breakfast was almost a delight. It might have been an Eden ... it _was_ ... with the serpent still in the grass!