and accounted for.  And then, just as he had glanced at his watch and found that it was close upon two o’clock, came the first real intimation that something was likely to happen.  Moving across the park towards him he heard the sound of a faint patter, curious and irregular in rhythm, which came from behind a range of low hillocks.  He raised himself on his hands and knees to watch.  His eyes were fastened upon a certain spot,—­a stretch of the open park between himself and the hillocks.  The patter ceased and began again.  Into the open there came a dark shape, the irregularity of its movements swiftly explained.  It moved at first upon all fours, then on two legs, then on all fours again.  It crept nearer and nearer, and Dominey, as he watched, laid aside his stick.  It reached the terrace, paused beneath Rosamund’s window, now barely half a dozen yards from where he was crouching.  Deliberately he waited, waited for what he knew must soon come.  Then the deep silence of the breathless night was broken by that familiar, unearthly scream.  Dominey waited till even its echoes had died away.  Then he ran a few steps, bent double, and stretched out his hands.  Once more, for the last time, that devil’s cry broke the deep stillness of the August morning, throbbing a little as though with a new fear, dying away as though the fingers which crushed it back down the straining throat had indeed crushed with it the last flicker of some unholy life.

When Doctor Harrison made his hurried appearance, a few moments later, he found Dominey seated upon the terrace, furiously smoking a cigarette.  On the ground, a few yards away, lay something black and motionless.

“What is it?” the doctor gasped.

For the first time Dominey showed some signs of a lack of self-control.  His voice was choked and uneven.

“Go and look at it, Doctor,” he said.  “It’s tied up, hand and foot.  You can see where the spirit of Roger Unthank has hidden itself.”

“Bosh!” the doctor answered, with grim contempt.  “It’s Roger Unthank himself.  The beast!”

A little stream of servants came running out.  Dominey gave a few orders quickly.

“Ring up the garage,” he directed, “and I shall want one of the men to go into Norwich to the hospital.  Doctor, will you go up and see Lady Dominey?”

The habits of a lifetime broke down.  Parkins, the immaculate, the silent, the perfect automaton, asked an eager question.

“What is it, sir?”

There was the sound of a window opening overhead.  At that moment Parkins would not have asked in vain for an annuity.  Dominey glanced at the little semicircle of servants and raised his voice.

“It is the end, I trust, of these foolish superstitions about Roger Unthank’s ghost.  There lies Roger Unthank, half beast, half man.  For some reason or other—­some lunatic’s reason, of course—­he has chosen to hide himself in the Black Wood all these years.  His mother, I presume, has been his accomplice and taken him food.  He is still alive but in a disgusting state.”