“Well, he had to mark the particular place by some book.  I thought that the joke of putting ‘The Narrow Way’ just over the entrance to the passage might appeal to him.  Apparently it did.”

Bill nodded to himself thoughtfully several times.  “Yes, that’s very neat,” he said.  “You’re a clever devil, Tony.”

Tony laughed.

“You encourage me to think so, which is bad for me, but very delightful.”

“Well, come on, then,” said Bill, and he got up, and held out a hand.

“Come on where?”

“To explore the passage, of course.”

Antony shook his head.

“Why ever not?”

“Well, what do you expect to find there?”

“I don’t know.  But you seemed to think that we might find something that would help.”

“Suppose we find Mark?” said Antony quietly.

“I say, do you really think he’s there?”

“Suppose he is?”

“Well, then, there we are.”

Antony walked over to the fireplace, knocked out the ashes of his pipe, and turned back to Bill.  He looked at him gravely without speaking.

“What are you going to say to him?” he said at last.

“How do you mean?”

“Are you going to arrest him, or help him to escape?”

“I—­I—­well, of course, I—­” began Bill, stammering, and then ended lamely, “Well, I don’t know.”

“Exactly.  We’ve got to make up our minds, haven’t we?”

Bill didn’t answer.  Very much disturbed in his mind, he walked restlessly about the room, frowning to himself, stopping now and then at the newly discovered door and looking at it as if he were trying to learn what lay behind it.  Which side was he on, if it came to choosing sides—­Mark’s or the Law’s?

“You know, you can’t just say, ‘Oh er hallo!’ to him,” said Antony, breaking rather appropriately into his thoughts.

Bill looked up at him with a start.

“Nor,” went on Antony, “can you say, ’This is my friend Mr. Gillingham, who is staying with you.  We were just going to have a game of bowls.’”

“Yes, it’s dashed difficult.  I don’t know what to say.  I’ve been rather forgetting about Mark.”  He wandered over to the window and looked out on to the lawns.  There was a gardener clipping the grass edges.  No reason why the lawn should be untidy just because the master of the house had disappeared.  It was going to be a hot day again.  Dash it, of course he had forgotten Mark.  How could he think of him as an escaped murderer, a fugitive from justice, when everything was going on just as it did yesterday, and the sun was shining just as it did when they all drove off to their golf, only twenty-four hours ago?  How could he help feeling that this was not real tragedy, but merely a jolly kind of detective game that he and Antony were playing?

He turned back to his friend.

“All the same,” he said, “you wanted to find the passage, and now you’ve found it.  Aren’t you going into it at all?”