“It sounds like a shot, sir, and it comes from Miss Pembury’s room.” CHAPTER XIX. OTHERWISE THAN INTENDED Scarcely had the housekeeper given this answer to her master’s inquiry, when a loud knocking at the front door, and the long tinkling of the electric bell, announced that some one was there, some one, as they all guessed, who was acquainted with what had happened. There was something so startling in this thundering at the door at the very moment when they were on their way upstairs towards the room which they imagined to be the scene of a tragedy, that both Sir Robert and Mrs. Hawkes stopped and turned upon the staircase. “Who’s that?” hissed the housekeeper. A man-servant had run to the door, but Sir Robert turned once more and pointed imperiously upwards. “Go on, go on, or let me pass,” he said. And then, as if the knocking at the door had been only the result of their own imaginations, excited by their fears, they both hurried on up the stairs. Swiftly there passed through the minds of both a succession of terrible thoughts, born of the events of the past month. The housekeeper was as well aware as her master and mistress themselves that there was acute tension between them, and in all the anxiety and suspense which the whole household had endured since the thefts from the gallery had become known and whispered about, the chief hope of everybody that some sort of satisfactory way out of the family difficulties might be found, centred on Rhoda Pembury. With her quiet manners, her attachment to the invalid boy, her evident efforts to preserve the peace between husband and wife, the girl had endeared herself to the lower members of the household as well as to Caryl, and Mrs. Hawkes in particular had persisted in believing that she would end by finding means to bring the ill-assorted couple together. But now the housekeeper was filled with fear that the peace-maker had been the victim of a fresh tragedy. She was even vaguely suspicious as to the hand by which such a tragedy as she feared might have been brought about. It was inevitable that some inkling of the truth about the death of poor Langton should have trickled through to the servants’ hall during those ten years which had elapsed since the death of the butler, that gossip should have fixed upon Jack Rotherfield as the possible holder of the clue to that old mystery. Now, therefore, it was not surprising that Mrs. Hawkes should ask herself whether Jack Rotherfield, who had already the guilt of one outrage at his door, might not have committed another. If Rhoda Pembury had been murdered because she stood between Lady Sarah and her husband’s rival, who but that rival could have been guilty of the act? So thought Mrs. Hawkes as she hurried along the corridor to the door of Rhoda’s room.