Joan was at that moment lying on her bed in the darkness of her room, her face towards the moonlit garden, and such a terror of the ordeal to be faced the next Monday in her thoughts as turned her cold and sent her heart fluttering into her throat.  Mario Escobar had been taken away that morning.  The news had reached Rackham, as it had reached every other house in the country-side.  Joan knew of it, and she felt soiled and humiliated beyond endurance as she thought upon her association with the spy.

The picture of the room crowded with witnesses, and people whom she knew, and strangers, whilst she gave the evidence which would turn their liking for her into contempt and suspicion would fade away from before her eyes, and the summer afternoon on Duncton Hill glow in its place.  She had bidden Hillyard look at the Weald of Sussex, that he might carry the smell of its soil, the aspect of its blooms and dark woodlands and brown cottages away with him as a treasure to which he could secretly turn like a miser to his gold; and she herself, with them ever before her eyes, had forgotten them altogether.  To sink back into the rank and file—­how fine she had thought it, and how little she had heeded it!  Now she had got to pay for her heedlessness, and she buried her face in her pillows and lay shivering.

Meanwhile, in the dining-room downstairs, Millie Splay, Sir Chichester and Harry Luttrell gathered about Martin at the table whilst he ate cold beef and drank a pint of champagne.

“I went up to London to see some one on the editorial staff of the Harpoon,” Martin explained.  “There were two questions I wanted answers for, if I could get them.  You see, according to McKerrel—­and you, Sir Chichester, say that he is a capable man—­Stella Croyle died at one in the morning.”

“Yes,” Sir Chichester agreed.

“About one,” Harry Luttrell corrected, with the exactness of the soldierly mind.

“‘About’ will do,” Martin rejoined.  “For newspapers go to press early nowadays.  The Harpoon would have been made up, and most of the editorial staff would have gone home an hour—­yes, actually an hour—­before Mrs. Croyle died here at Rackham in Sussex.  Yet the news is in that very issue.  How did that happen?  How did the news reach the office of the Harpoon an hour before the event occurred?”

“Yes, that is what has been bothering me,” added Sir Chichester.

“Well, that was one question,” Martin resumed.  “Here’s the other.  How, when the news had reached the Harpoon office, did it get printed in the paper?”

Millie Splay found no difficulty in providing an explanation of that.

“It’s sensational,” she said disdainfully.

Martin shook his head.