I walked on quickly and he followed. Really the fuss was getting on my nerves, already distinctly ragged. The front door was open as I had left it, and I paused for a moment in the cobwebby hall. Then, pulling myself together, I stepped into the room where the body lay, to halt and stare open-mouthed at the floor.... The candles still flickered on the mantelpiece; the furniture was as I had left it; but of the body of John Trelawnay there was not a trace. It had vanished utterly and completely. "I don’t understand, doctor," I muttered foolishly. "I left the body lying there." The doctor stood at the door beside me, and suddenly I realized that his eyes were fixed on me. "I know," he said, and his voice was grave and solemn. "With the head near that chair." "Why, how do you know?" I cried, amazed. "Have you taken the body away?" But he answered my question by another. "Do you notice anything strange in this room, sir?" he asked. "On the floor?" "Only a lot of dust," I remarked. "Precisely," he said. "And one would expect footprints in dust. I see yours going to the mantelpiece; I see no others." I clutched his arm, as his meaning came to me. "My God!" I whispered. "What do you mean?" "I mean," he said, "that Rupert Carlingham murdered John Trelawnay, and then killed himself and his wife, five years ago ... during just such another storm as we have had this evening." _*IV — The Man who would not Play Cards*_ *I* "Thanks very much, but as I told you before—I don’t play cards." The speaker, a tall, bronzed man whose clear eye and slightly weather-beaten face proclaimed him to be no dweller in cities, paused at the smoking-room door, and stared, a little deliberately, at the man who had just accosted him. It was the second time that day that this same gentleman had endeavoured to rope him into a game of poker—"just small stakes, you know"—and Hugh Massingham disliked being asked things twice. Almost as much as, in this particular case, he disliked the appearance of the asker. He paused long enough to let the stare become pointed; then he opened the door and stepped out on deck. He hated the stuffiness of the smoking-room, with its eternal cards and whisky pegs, and with an atmosphere so thick with tobacco smoke that at times he could hardly see across it. Away to port, like a faint smudge on the horizon, lay the North Coast of Africa, and Hugh Massingham, with a faint smile, wondered just how many times he’d seen that smudge before. And how many times he’d see it in the future.