"Too fond, I think," Miss Balmaine said significantly. "She would not be allowed to be so much with the servants if she were my sister. I should get a temporary governess for her until she goes back to school."
"I am afraid we shall have to do something of the sort," said Dorothy absently. "But Maureen will hate it so, and Alice is quite a nice girl. Cream, Mr. Cardyn, and sugar?"
"No cream, please. But sugar—heaps of it—three lumps at least," Bruce said as he strode up to take his cup from her hand. "How this Russian fashion of taking lemon in tea grows. It wouldn't do for me."
"Nor for me either," Dorothy laughed. "I am a sugar-baby too. Oh, Soames, how lovely! You do spoil us!" as the butler entered the room with a tray of hot cakes in his hand.
"Only the spoiling is unnecessary as the last lot is not finished yet," John Daventry said, helping himself to another piece of cake.
Soames regarded him benevolently.
"They don't last long, sir. I know the young ladies' tastes. If Miss Maureen—Ah!"
The covered dish which he was about to set upon the tea-table dropped from his hand and he stood still, staring at the window farthest from Lady Anne. His breath came quick and fast, his jaws worked about from side to side. Everyone turned to look, and there was an outburst of screams from the girls. Then Bruce Cardyn sprang forward.
Outside the window, so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it, was a white face—a chalk-white face, whether of man or woman none could tell. Around it there seemed to float a grey mist. Spirit or living creature! Even Bruce Cardyn, keen-witted detective as he was, felt a momentary doubt. He shook the window. It was latched. As he raised his hand to open it he momentarily took his eyes from the figure outside, and in that moment it vanished. Throwing the sash up he leaned out, conscious that the others were pressing up against him, calling, questioning, exclaiming.
Hearing the outcry, a man came running across the grass towards the house. Cardyn was rubbing his eyes in utter amazement; where on earth had the figure at the window disappeared to? What in the world had become of it? There was no ladder or rope to be seen, no sign of anyone on the terrace beneath. And yet Bruce had only taken his eyes off the creature, whatever it was, for one moment, not time enough for the slickest burglar to have got away.
The man hastening over the lawn had reached the sundial at the foot of the low terrace now—Cardyn knew him for one of his underlings, put on as an extra gardener to watch the house.
"Bradley!" he shouted. "Some one has been trying to get into the house and pretty nearly succeeded too. Did you see him?"
"No, sir!" said the man, staring upwards in a puzzled fashion, "leastways, just as I heard the shouting I thought I saw something moving on the wall, but didn't notice where it came from or where it went to. I don't think it was a man—all gliding about like a snake it was."
"Snakes haven't got white faces," Cardyn said sharply.
"The Cat Burglar!" One of the girls behind him cried out.
Cardyn never knew which, for in the pause which followed, his quick ear caught another sound—a groan, a cry, a stifled choking groan.
"What was that?" he cried, turning quickly and pushing back those who were pressing against him—John Daventry, Margaret Balmaine, Dorothy Fyvert and Soames.
Nobody answered him. Every one appeared to be struggling to lean out of the window at once.
With a terrible prevision of evil, he extricated himself from the crush. The next minute he knew that his prevision had been horribly justified. Lady Anne sat still in her revolving chair, but she had fallen aside and lay across the arm in a huddled-up position. It was from her lips that cry had come—they were still parted, open, and from one corner a thin stream of blood and froth was trickling down her chin on to the laces of her gown.
As Cardyn reached her she opened her eyes and looked at him with a gleam of comprehension.
"It was—it was—"
The last word broke in a rush of blood. Lady Anne's head fell back, her jaw dropped, and before anyone could realize the horror that had happened in their midst the keen-witted, clear-headed mistress of the house in Charlton Crescent had ceased to exist. For one moment he thought of heart failure—of an aneurism that had burst crossed Cardyn's mind. Then in a flash he realized—knew that what he had sworn to prevent had happened. In spite of all his precautions Lady Anne's assassin had been successful. But now John Daventry and Soames were beside him. They cried aloud in horror; they tried to raise Lady Anne but she lay in their arms a limp, inert mass.
"It is her heart—it has been weak for years! That brute has killed her—the shock of seeing him at the window has frightened her to death!"
"Shock had nothing to do with it," Cardyn said shortly. He motioned Soames aside and took the pitiful-looking figure that till ten minutes ago had been the masterful Lady Anne Daventry from John Daventry. He rested it as well as he could against the wooden back of a chair.
"Look!" he cried, pointing downwards.
Protruding from the dead woman's breast was the gold and jewelled dagger she had shown them half an hour before. And, looking horribly incongruous among the laces of her fichu, a deep stain was spreading.
Some one had switched on the electric light and Cardyn saw that John Daventry's ruddy face had turned an ugly, sickly green, that Dorothy Fyvert and Margaret Balmaine were clinging together, shaking with fright—even in that awful moment his eyebrows contracted at the sight—and that Soames stood staring at his dead mistress like a man turned to stone. But as Bruce looked at him his face twitched to one side, and he put up his hands.
"Oh, my poor lady! my poor lady!"
"But what does it mean—what has happened?" John Daventry demanded, his voice and manners those of a man out of his mind.
For answer Cardyn pointed to the handle of the dagger—to that ominous growing stain.
"Murder!" he said laconically. "Wilful murder!"
Chapter VI
"I can't believe it! I can't believe it!" John Daventry reiterated, pressing his handkerchief over his brow.
He had been saying the same thing at intervals ever since Cardyn had literally pushed him out of the chamber of death. For in her sitting-room Lady Anne still sat in death, where she had so often sat in life, the eternal question that her eyes had asked of late, answered at last—for her!
For the rest of them it had become a thousand times more insistent, more acute. As Bruce Cardyn glanced round at the faces of those who so short a time before had met in Lady Anne's sitting-room for tea, he saw the same question in the eyes of each—Who? Which?
Already they were beginning to draw shudderingly away from one another. Even the two girls, instead of clinging together, were eyeing one another furtively, shivering as each sat back in her chair.
Bruce Cardyn and John Daventry were standing in the middle of the room. The shock of the horror seemed almost to have scared Daventry's wits away.
Bruce Cardyn had been literally forced to take command of the situation. He it was who had insisted on the room being left exactly as it was until the arrival of the doctor and the police. He it was who had shepherded them all into the small library until they had been questioned.
The only addition to their number had been Pirnie, Lady Anne's maid, who knelt with her head against the sitting-room door, moaning and crying and calling upon her dead mistress by name.
Soames stood by the other door. As far as outward appearances went he was the attentive butler still, though a close observer would have