He took the candle from the table and lit it, and the fingers that held the match trembled.

“We needn’t trouble Marx,” he explained.  “That beast’s in his vacuum by this time.”

III

They crossed the hall and began to ascend the carpetless wooden stairs.  They were in the well of the house and the air cut like ice.  Garvey, the flickering candle in his hand throwing his face into strong outline, led the way across the first landing and opened a door near the mouth of a dark passage.  A pleasant room greeted the visitor’s eyes, and he rapidly took in its points while his host walked over and lit two candles that stood on a table at the foot of the bed.  A fire burned brightly in the grate.  There were two windows, opening like doors, in the wall opposite, and a high canopied bed occupied most of the space on the right.  Panelling ran all round the room reaching nearly to the ceiling and gave a warm and cosy appearance to the whole; while the portraits that stood in alternate panels suggested somehow the atmosphere of an old country house in England.  Shorthouse was agreeably surprised.

“I hope you’ll find everything you need,” Garvey was saying in the doorway.  “If not, you have only to ring that bell by the fireplace.  Marx won’t hear it of course, but it rings in my laboratory, where I spend most of the night.”

Then, with a brief good-night, he went out and shut the door after him.  The instant he was gone Mr. Sidebotham’s private secretary did a peculiar thing.  He planted himself in the middle of the room with his back to the door, and drawing the pistol swiftly from his hip pocket levelled it across his left arm at the window.  Standing motionless in this position for thirty seconds he then suddenly swerved right round and faced in the other direction, pointing his pistol straight at the keyhole of the door.  There followed immediately a sound of shuffling outside and of steps retreating across the landing.

“On his knees at the keyhole,” was the secretary’s reflection.  “Just as I thought.  But he didn’t expect to look down the barrel of a pistol and it made him jump a little.”

As soon as the steps had gone downstairs and died away across the hall, Shorthouse went over and locked the door, stuffing a piece of crumpled paper into the second keyhole which he saw immediately above the first.  After that, he made a thorough search of the room.  It hardly repaid the trouble, for he found nothing unusual.  Yet he was glad he had made it.  It relieved him to find no one was in hiding under the bed or in the deep oak cupboard; and he hoped sincerely it was not the cupboard in which the unfortunate spaniel had come to its vile death.  The French windows, he discovered, opened on to a little balcony.  It looked on to the front, and there was a drop of less than twenty feet to the ground below.  The bed was high and wide, soft as feathers and covered with snowy sheets—­very inviting to a tired man; and beside the blazing fire were a couple of deep armchairs.