There lay the black still form of Samoval supine, his white face staring up into the heavens, and beside him knelt Tremayne, whilst in the balcony above leaned her ladyship. The rope ladder, Sir Terence’s swift glance observed, had disappeared. He halted in his advance, standing at gaze a moment. He had hardly expected so much. He had conceived the plan of causing the house to be searched immediately upon Mullins’s discovery of the body. But Tremayne’s rashness in adventuring down in this fashion spared him even that necessity. True, it set up other difficulties. But he was not sure that the matter would not be infinitely more interesting thus. He stepped forward, and came to a standstill beside the two--his dead enemy and his living one. CHAPTER XIII. POLICHINELLE “Why, Ned,” he asked gravely, “what has happened?” “It is Samoval,” was Tremayne’s quiet answer. “He is quite dead.” He stood up as he spoke, and Sir Terence observed with terrible inward mirth that his tone had the frank and honest ring, his bearing the imperturbable ease which more than once before had imposed upon him as the outward signs of an easy conscience. This secretary of his was a cool scoundrel. “Samoval, is it?” said Sir Terence, and went down on one knee beside the body to make a perfunctory examination. Then he looked up at the captain. “And how did this happen?” “Happen?” echoed Tremayne, realising that the question was being addressed particularly to himself. “That is what I am wondering. I found him here in this condition.” “You found him here? Oh, you found him here in this condition! Curious!” Over his shoulder he spoke to the butler: “Mullins, you had better call the guard.” He picked up the slender weapon that lay beside Samoval. “A duelling sword!” Then he looked searchingly about him until his eyes caught the gleam of the other blade near the wall, where himself he had dropped it. “Ah!” he said, and went to pick it up. “Very odd!” He looked up at the balcony, over the parapet of which his wife was leaning. “Did you see anything, my dear?” he asked, and neither Tremayne nor she detected the faint note of wicked mockery in the question. There was a moment’s pause before she answered him, faltering: “N-no. I saw nothing.” Sir Terence’s straining ears caught no faintest sound of the voice that had prompted her urgently from behind the curtained windows. “How long have you been there?” he asked her. “A--a moment only,” she replied, again after a pause. “I--I thought I heard a cry, and--and I came to see what had happened.” Her voice shook with terror; but what she beheld would have been quite enough to account for that.