LITMIR.BIZ

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      For a moment we all gazed stupidly at that jar and candle; but the next moment our eyes were fastened on Philip's face.

      Now ordinarily Esdaile's face, clean-shaven since 1914, is quite a pleasant one to look at, lightly browned, and with the savor of the sea still lingering about it. Nor was it noticeably pale now. Indeed, you might have said that some inner excitation made it not pale at all. But there was no disguising the strained tenseness of it. At the same time he was obviously attempting such a disguise. His features were set in a would-be-easy smile, but the smile stopped at his eyes. These blinked, though possibly at the sudden brightness after the obscurity below. And he spoke without pause or preliminary, as if rehearsing something he had had time to get letter-perfect but not to make entirely and naturally his own.

      "Did you think I was never coming up?" The mechanical smile was turned on us all in turn. "I suppose I have been rather a long time. Just wool-gathering. I apologize to everybody. Where are the liqueur-glasses?"

      There was a dead silence. Was it possible that he had heard nothing, knew nothing of what had occurred?

      Monty Rooke was the first to speak.

      "Do you mean to say you didn't hear it?" he blurted out.

      Then, as Philip seemed to concentrate that artificial smile suddenly on him alone, he seemed sorry he had drawn attention to himself.

      "And where on earth have you been?" Philip demanded slowly. "What's the matter with your clothes? Been emptying the dustbins? Here, let me give you a clean-up, man——"

      He got rid of the jar of liqueur, not by putting it down on a table, but by the simple if unusual expedient of letting it drop through his fingers, where it made a heavy thump, rolled over on its side, and came to rest. He stepped forward.

      But Rooke, for some reason or other, stepped much more quickly back. He muttered something about his clothes not mattering—it was only a few grains of dust, but damp—better let it dry before touching it——

      It was at this point that I caught Cecil Hubbard's eye.

      Hubbard's is a bright blue eye, with angular lids like little set-squares and a tiny dark dot in the middle of the blue. That eye may not know very much about pictures, but it knows a good deal about men and their faces. Esdaile was taking risks if he hoped to play any tricks with that eye on him.

      Then, having caught mine for that moment, the eye was attentively fixed on our host again.

      You see how preposterous it was already. Esdaile apparently could notice a trifle like the dust on Rooke's clothes, but he seemed to be both blind and deaf to everything else—the soft surging murmurs of the crowd outside, the voice of the Inspector in the garden, the shadows of strangers across the French windows. He just dropped heavy stone jars to the floor, talked about wool-gathering, and had not even thought of extinguishing the candle that was melting and guttering in his hand.

      Wool-gathering—Philip Esdaile, the least woolly-minded of men!

      Already I was certain that he was deliberately acting, and acting far from well at that.

      It was little Alan, the elder of the two boys, who broke the spell that seemed to have benumbed us all. He ran forward, his blue-and-white check smock against his father's knees and his little face upturned.

      "A naeroplane, daddy!" he cried eagerly. "Some men fell out of a naeroplane close to Jimmy and me, didn't they, Auntie Joan? In a parachute, bigger'n this room!" The little arms were outstretched to their widest reach. "Do come quick and look, daddy!"

      And he seized his father's hand.

      Again I caught Hubbard's eye. Esdaile was at it again, this time with a badly-exaggerated gesture of astonishment. He might have made just such a gesture if Alan had told him that the Grandmother in the bed was really a Wolf—good enough for children but not for anybody else. Hubbard at any rate thought that this had lasted long enough.

      "Do you mean to say that you didn't feel the whole house shake half an hour ago?" he demanded.

      Esdaile turned, but with a curious reluctance that I didn't understand.

      "I did fancy I heard a noise of some sort," he admitted. "What about it?"

      Hubbard gave it to him plain and unvarnished, for all the world as if he had been in the Admiral's office with a sentry with a bayonet at the door.

      "A plane crashed, and two men came down on your roof in a parachute. One's living, the other's killed. Those are the police in your garden now. That's all—except that you seem to live in a pretty solidly-constructed house."

      This time Esdaile made no demonstration. He stood listening for a moment longer, as if he thought Hubbard might add something; then, without a word, he released himself from Alan's hand and strode, not to the garden where the voices were, but towards the studio door.

VI

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      The studio (into which Hubbard and I immediately followed him) was a large oblong apartment, with a portion of one of its longer sides and almost the whole of the roof glazed. More or less light could be admitted by means of a system of dark blue blinds and cords running to cleats on the walls. It was to the roof-glass that my eyes turned first of all. One corner of it was darkened, as if melted snow had slipped down its slope, but the irregular triangle thus made was not so dark but that the shapes of the two heads could be seen, a little darker still. Nearer up to the ridge one thick pane was badly starred, and in the middle of the star was a small hole. This I judged to have been made by the broken branch that still brushed and played about it. A couple of pictures had fallen from the walls and lay face downward among their sprinklings of broken glass on the floor. One or two others were disarranged. Otherwise the apartment seemed to be undamaged.

      Esdaile's behavior was now odder than ever. With those two men lying on the roof just over his head and the police moving about the garden outside, apparently he found nothing more urgent to do than to move displaced rugs about and to push at the bits of broken glass with his foot. And he did this with the candle, now a stalagmite of tallow, still licking and flickering in his hand.

      He made no remark when Hubbard took the candle almost roughly from him, blew it out, and set it down on the table where the artist's tubes and brushes usually stood.

      "We'll be rid of that first of all," he said. "Unless it's a mascot. Scaring 'em to death with that in your hand like a sleepwalker in traveling-tweeds! Now what about it, Esdaile?"

      There was sudden attention in Philip's attitude, though he still looked down at the floor and pushed at a rug with his toe.

      "What about what?" he asked.

      "About this last half-hour."

      "You mean where have I been? I went down into the cellar. I went to get that liqueur."

      "That doesn't take half an hour—and it certainly didn't take this particular half-hour."

      To this Esdaile made no reply.

      "Come," said Hubbard again after a pause. "You admitted just now that you thought you heard something."

      The words came slowly. "Did I? Yes, I remember. But it was all muffled. Honestly, I couldn't tell from the sound that it was—that it was all this."

      "Was that when you were down there, or as you were going down, or when?"

      "I'd just got down, I think."

      "But didn't you wonder what was the matter? What kept you all that time? And what's the matter with you now that you have come up?"

      "The matter?" Esdaile began once more to parry; and then suddenly his manner changed. For the first time he looked up from the floor, and the mask, whatever it was, almost

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