“Oh, my lady, I must go up too!” she cried, twisting her hands together.  “Mrs. Croyle was always very kind to me, poor lady.  I must come!”

“She won’t keep her head,” Sir Chichester objected, who was fast losing his.  But Milly Splay laid her hand upon the girl’s arm.

“Yes, you shall come with us, Jenny,” she said gently, and the four of them moved out of the room.

The others followed them as far as the hall, and stood grouped at the foot of the staircase.

“Miranda, would you like to go out into the air?” Dennis Brown asked with solicitude of his wife.

“No, dear, I am all right.  I—­oh, poor woman!” and with a sob she dropped her face in her hands.

“Hush!” Luttrell called sharply for silence, and a moment afterwards, a loud shrill scream rent the air like lightning.

Miranda cowered from it.

“Jenny Prask!” said Hillyard.

“Then—­then—­the news is true,” faltered Miranda, and she would have fallen but for the arm of her husband about her waist.

They waited until Sir Chichester came down the stairs to them.  He was shaken and trembling.  He, the spectator of dramas, was now a character in one most tragically enacted under his own roof.

“The report is true to the letter,” he said in a low voice.  “Dennis, will you go for McKerrel, the doctor.  You know his house in Midhurst.  Will you take your car, and bring him back.  There is nothing more that we can do until he comes.”  He stood for a little while by the table in the hall, staring down at it, and taking particular note of its grain.

“A curious thing,” he said.  “The key of her room is missing altogether.”

To no one did it come at this moment that the disappearance of the key was to prove a point of vast importance.  No one made any comment, and Sir Chichester fell to silence again.  “She looked like a child sleeping,” he said at length, “a child without a care.”

Then he sat down and took the newspaper from his pocket.  Mr. Albany Todd suddenly advanced to Harry Luttrell.  He had been no less observant than Martin Hillyard.

“You alone, Colonel Luttrell,” he said, “were not surprised.”

“I was not,” answered Harry frankly.  “I was shocked, but not surprised.  For I knew Mrs. Croyle at a time when she was so tormented that she could not sleep at all.  During that time she learnt to take drugs, and especially that drug in precisely that way that the newspaper described.”

The men drifted out of the hall on to the lawn, leaving Sir Chichester brooding above the outspread sheets of the Harpoon.  Here was the insoluble sinister question to which somehow he had to find an answer.  Stella Croyle died late last night, in the country, at Rackham Park; and yet in this very morning’s issue of the newspaper, her death with every circumstance and detail was truthfully recorded, hours before it was even known by anybody in the house itself.