Dr. Ravenshaw crossed to the centre of the room and bent over the body, feeling the heart.  Husband and wife watched him, huddled together, their white faces framed in the shadow of the doorway.  In a moment he was on his feet again, advancing towards them.  “We can do no good here, Mrs. Pendleton,” he said gently.  “Your brother is dead.”

“Dead?  Robert dead!” Her startled eye sought his averted face, and her feminine intuition gathered that which he was seeking to withhold.  “Do you mean that he has been killed?” she whimpered.

“I fear that there has been—­an accident,” he replied evasively.  He stood in front of them in a way which obscured their view of the prone figure, and a small shining thing lying alongside, which he alone had seen.  “Come,” he said, in a professional manner, taking her by the arm.  “Let me take you downstairs.”  He got her away from the threshold, and pulled the broken door to, shutting out the spectacle within.

“Are you going to leave him there—­like that?” whispered Mrs. Pendleton.

“It is necessary, till the police have seen him,” he assured her.  “We had better send Thalassa in the car to the churchtown.  Go for Sergeant Pengowan, Thalassa, and tell him to come at once.  And afterwards you had better call at Mr. Austin Turold’s lodgings and tell him and his son.  Hurry away with you, my man.  Don’t lose a moment!”

Thalassa hastened along the passage as though glad to get away.  His heavy boots clattered down the staircase and along the empty hall.  Then the front door banged with a crash.

The others followed more slowly, stepping gently in the presence of Death, past the little lamps, hardly bigger than fireflies, which flickered feebly in their alcoves.  They went into the front room, where a table lamp gave forth a subdued light.  Mrs. Pendleton turned up the wick and sank into a chair, covering her face with her hands.

It was the room where only that afternoon Robert Turold had unfolded the history of his life’s quest:  a large gloomy room with heavy old furniture, faded prints of the Cornish coast, and a whitefaced clock on the mantel-piece with a loud clucking tick.  Dr. Ravenshaw knew the room well, but Robert Turold’s sister had seen it for the first time that day, and the recollection of what had taken place there was so fresh in her memory that it brought a flood of tears.

“Poor Bob!” she sobbed.  “He denied himself all his life for the sake of the title, and what’s the good of it all—­now?”

That was the only light in which she was able to see the tragedy in the first moment of the shock.  Other thoughts and revelations about her brother’s strange death were to come later, when her mind recovered its bearings.  For the moment she was incapable of thinking coherently.  She was conscious only of the fact that her brother had been cut off in the very moment of success—­before it, indeed; ere he had actually tasted the sweets of the ambition he had given all his years to gain.