disc itself was made of wood, there was a layer of earth on it with the live grass still growing there.  And the removal of the round lid revealed a round hole, black as night and seemingly bottomless.  Paynter understood it instantly.  It was rather near the sea for a well to be sunk, but the traveler had known wells sunk even nearer.  He rose to his feet with the great knife in his hand, a frown on his face, and his doubts resolved.  He no longer shrank from naming what he knew.  This was not the first corpse that had been thrown down a well; here, without stone or epitaph, was the grave of Squire Vane.  In a flash all the mythological follies about saints and peacocks were forgotten; he was knocked on the head, as with a stone club, by the human common sense of crime.

Cyprian Paynter stood long by the well in the wood, walked round it in meditation, examined its rim and the ring of grass about it, searched the surrounding soil thoroughly, came back and stood beside the well once more.  His researches and reflections had been so long that he had not realized that the day had passed and that the wood and the world round it were beginning already to be steeped in the enrichment of evening.  The day had been radiantly calm; the sea seemed to be as still as the well, and the well was as still as a mirror.  And then, quite without warning, the mirror moved of itself like a living thing.

In the well, in the wood, the water leapt and gurgled, with a grotesque noise like something swallowing, and then settled again with a second sound.  Cyprian could not see into the well clearly, for the opening, from where he stood, was an ellipse, a mere slit, and half masked by thistles and rank grass like a green beard.  For where he stood now was three yards away from the well, and he had not yet himself realized that he had sprung back all that distance from the brink when the water spoke.

III.  THE MYSTERY OF THE WELL

Cyprian Paynter did not know what he expected to see rise out of the well—­the corpse of the murdered man or merely the spirit of the fountain.  Anyhow, neither of them rose out of it, and he recognized after an instant that this was, after all, perhaps the more natural course of things.  Once more he pulled himself together, walked to the edge of the well and looked down.  He saw, as before, a dim glimmer of water, at that depth no brighter than ink; he fancied he still heard a faint convulsion and murmur, but it gradually subsided to an utter stillness.  Short of suicidally diving in, there was nothing to be done.  He realized that, with all his equipment, he had not even brought anything like a rope or basket, and at length decided to return for them.  As he retraced his steps to the entrance, he recurred to, and took stock of, his more solid discoveries.  Somebody had gone into the wood, killed the Squire and thrown him down the well, but he did not admit