Godfrey answered with a despairing shrug.

“That is what we’ve got to find out,” he said.

“We shall have to call in the police,” suggested Hughes.  “Maybe they can solve it.”

Godfrey smiled, a little sceptical smile, quickly suppressed.

“At least, they will have to be given the chance,” he agreed.  “Shall I attend to it?”

“Yes,” said Hughes; “and you would better do it right away.  The sooner they get here the better.”

“Very well,” assented Godfrey, and left the room.

Hughes sat down heavily on the couch near the window, and mopped his face again, with a shaking hand.  Death he was accustomed to—­but death met decently in bed and resulting from some understood cause.  Death in this horrible and mysterious form shook him; he could not understand it, and his failure to understand appalled him.  He was a physician; it was his business to understand; and yet here was death in a form as mysterious to him as to the veriest layman.  It compelled him to pause and take stock of himself—­always a disconcerting process to the best of us!

That was a trying half hour.  Hughes sat on the couch, breathing heavily, staring at the floor, perhaps passing his own ignorance in review, perhaps wondering if he had always been right in prescribing this or that.  As for me, I was thinking of my dead friend.  I remembered Philip Vantine as I had always known him—­a kindly, witty, Christian gentleman.  I could see his pleasant eyes looking at me in friendship, as they had looked a few hours before; I could hear his voice, could feel the clasp of his hand.  That such a man should be killed like this, struck down by a mysterious assassin, armed with a poisoned weapon....

A woman!  Always my mind came back to that.  A woman!  Poison was a woman’s weapon.  But who was she?  How had she escaped?  Where had she concealed herself?  How was she able to strike so surely?  Above all, why should she have chosen Philip Vantine, of all men, for her victim—­Philip Vantine, who had never injured any woman—­and then I paused.  For I realised that I knew nothing of Vantine, except what he had chosen to tell me.  Parks would know.  And then I shrank from the thought.  Must we probe that secret?  Must we compel a man to betray his master?

My face was burning.  No, we could not do that—­that would be abominable....

The door opened and Godfrey came in.  This time, he was not alone.  Simmonds and Goldberger followed him, and their faces showed that they were as shaken and nonplussed as I. There was a third man with them whom I did not know; but I soon found out that it was Freylinghuisen, the coroner’s physician.