or being late in
making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always
come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so
they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk,
isn't it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds,
and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely
horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to
turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his
hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes
were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.
It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his
visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical
exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the
least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On
the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the
last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not
to what Framton was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't
they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look
intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out
through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock
of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same
direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn
towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of
them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.
A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared
the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I
said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, t