“Maddison?” said Smith sharply, staring across at Weymouth.  “What was he?  Where did he come from?”

“He was a retired tea-planter from Colombo,” replied the inspector.

“Colombo?”

“There was a link with the East, certainly, if that’s what you are thinking; and it was this fact which interested me at the time, and which led me to waste precious days and nights on the case.  But there was no mortal connection between this liverish individual and the schemes of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  I’m certain of that.”

“And how did he die?” I asked, interestedly.

“He just died in his chair one evening, in the room which he used as a library.  It was his custom to sit there every night, when there were no visitors, reading, until twelve o’clock—­or later.  He was a bachelor, and his household consisted of a cook, a housemaid, and a man who had been with him for thirty years, I believe.  At the time of Mr. Maddison’s death, his household had recently been deprived of two of its members.  The cook and housemaid both resigned one morning, giving as their reason the fact that the place was haunted.”

“In what way?”

“I interviewed the precious pair at the time, and they told me absurd and various tales about dark figures wandering along the corridors and bending over them in bed at night, whispering; but their chief trouble was a continuous ringing of bells about the house.”

“Bells?”

“They said that it became unbearable.  Night and day there were bells ringing all over the house.  At any rate, they went, and for three or four days the Gables was occupied only by Mr. Maddison and his man, whose name was Stevens.  I interviewed the latter also, and he was an altogether more reliable witness; a decent, steady sort of man whose story impressed me very much at the time.”

“Did he confirm the ringing?”

“He swore to it—­a sort of jangle, sometimes up in the air, near the ceilings, and sometimes under the floor, like the shaking of silver bells.”

Nayland Smith stood up abruptly and began to pace the room, leaving great trails of blue-gray smoke behind him.

“Your story is sufficiently interesting, Inspector,” he declared, “even to divert my mind from the eternal contemplation of the Fu-Manchu problem.  This would appear to be distinctly a case of an ‘astral bell’ such as we sometimes hear of in India.”

“It was Stevens,” continued Weymouth, “who found Mr. Maddison.  He (Stevens) had been out on business connected with the household arrangements, and at about eleven o’clock he returned, letting himself in with a key.  There was a light in the library, and getting no response to his knocking, Stevens entered.  He found his master sitting bolt upright in a chair, clutching the arms with rigid fingers and staring straight before him with a look of such frightful horror on his face, that Stevens positively ran from the room and out of the house.  Mr. Maddison was stone dead.  When a doctor, who lives at no great distance away, came and examined him, he could find no trace of violence whatever; he had apparently died of fright, to judge from the expression on his face.”