it.

"Jenny Prask!" said Hillyard.

"Then--then--the news is true," faltered Miranda, and she would have
fallen but for the arm of her husband about her waist.

They waited until Sir Chichester came down the stairs to them. He was
shaken and trembling. He, the spectator of dramas, was now a character
in one most tragically enacted under his own roof.

"The report is true to the letter," he said in a low voice. "Dennis,
will you go for McKerrel, the doctor. You know his house in Midhurst.
Will you take your car, and bring him back. There is nothing more that
we can do until he comes." He stood for a little while by the table in
the hall, staring down at it, and taking particular note of its grain.

"A curious thing," he said. "The key of her room is missing altogether."

To no one did it come at this moment that the disappearance of the key
was to prove a point of vast importance. No one made any comment, and
Sir Chichester fell to silence again. "She looked like a child
sleeping," he said at length, "a child without a care."

Then he sat down and took the newspaper from his pocket. Mr. Albany Todd
suddenly advanced to Harry Luttrell. He had been no less observant than
Martin Hillyard.

"You alone, Colonel Luttrell," he said, "were not surprised."

"I was not," answered Harry frankly. "I was shocked, but not surprised.
For I knew Mrs. Croyle at a time when she was so tormented that she
could not sleep at all. During that time she learnt to take drugs, and
especially that drug in precisely that way that the newspaper
described."

The men drifted out of the hall on to the lawn, leaving Sir Chichester
brooding above the outspread sheets of the _Harpoon_. Here was the
insoluble sinister question to which somehow he had to find an answer.
Stella Croyle died late last night, in the country, at Rackham Park; and
yet in this very morning's issue of the newspaper, her death with every
circumstance and detail was truthfully recorded, hours before it was
even known by anybody in the house itself.

"How can that be?" Sir Chichester exclaimed in despair. "How can it
be?"

CHAPTER XXIX

JENNY PUTS UP HER FIGHT

Stella, the undisciplined! She had flung out of the rank and file, as
long ago Sir Charles Hardiman had put it, and to this end she had come,
waywardness exacting its inexorable price. Harry Luttrell, however, was
not able to lull his conscience with any such easy reflections. He
walked with Martin Hil