Not a chest—it was a coffin; and on it was a strange little plate glittering like gold, with an inscription: MURIEL QUELTON BELOVED WIFE OF PAUL QUELTON XXIII When she looked back upon the experiences of that dreadful night, it seemed to Lexy that both she and her companion displayed almost incredible endurance. Since morning they had lived through a very lifetime of emotion, to end now in this tragedy more horrible than anything they could have feared. Yet, not five minutes after his cry of agony, Captain Grey had recovered his self-control. He was able to speak quietly to Lexy, and she was able to answer him no less quietly. “We’d better go,” he said. “We can do nothing here. It’s a case for the police now.” “I’ve got to go back to the balcony,” Lexy told him. “There was something there.” “Very well!” he agreed, and, without another word or a backward glance, he went up the ladder. They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places. “Nothing here,” said Captain Grey. Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something. “Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?” He came to her side. “It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.” For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place. “We’d better look in the garden,” he suggested. They went down. The grass beneath the balcony was beaten down in one place, but there was nothing else. Some one had come and gone. They could not even guess who it had been. They knew nothing. “Come, Lexy!” the captain said. They both turned for one last look at the accursed house, blazing with spectral lights. Then they set off, away from it, over that weary road again. “There’s no police station in the village, is there?” he asked. “I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard Mrs. Royce talk about the constable. Anyhow, she can tell us.” “Yes,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “Rather a pity, isn’t it,” he went on, “that there has to be—all that? Because it doesn’t matter now. It’s finished. Better if the house burned down to-night!”