it? What had Miss
Norris got to do with it? This was a question which Antony had already
asked himself that afternoon, and it seemed to him now that he had found
the answer. As he lay in bed that night he reassembled his ideas, and
looked at them in the new light which the events of the evening threw
upon the dark corners in his brain.

Of course it was natural that Cayley should want to get rid of his
guests as soon as the tragedy was discovered. He would want this for
their own sake as well as for his. But he had been a little too quick
about suggesting it, and about seeing the suggestion carried out. They
had been bustled off as soon as they could be packed. The suggestion
that they were in his hands, to go or stay as he wished, could have been
left safely to them. As it was, they had been given no alternative,
and Miss Norris, who had proposed to catch an after-dinner train at the
junction, in the obvious hope that she might have in this way a
dramatic cross-examination at the hands of some keen-eyed detective, was
encouraged tactfully, but quite firmly, to travel by the earlier train
with the others. Antony had felt that Cayley, in the tragedy which had
suddenly befallen the house, ought to have been equally indifferent to
her presence or absence. But he was not; and Antony assumed from this
that Cayley was very much alive to the necessity for her absence.

Why?

Well, that question was not to be answered off-hand. But the fact that
it was so had made Antony interested in her; and it was for this reason
that he had followed up so alertly Bill's casual mention of her in
connection with the dressing-up business. He felt that he wanted to know
a little more about Miss Norris and the part she had played in the Red
House circle. By sheer luck, as it seemed to him, he had stumbled on the
answer to his question.

Miss Norris was hurried away because she knew about the secret passage.

The passage, then, had something to do with the mystery of Robert's
death. Miss Norris had used it in order to bring off her dramatic
appearance as the ghost. Possibly she had discovered it for herself;
possibly Mark had revealed it to her secretly one day, never guessing
that she would make so unkind a use of it later on; possibly Cayley,
having been let into the joke of the dressing-up, had shown her how she
could make her appearance on the bowling-green even more mysterious and
supernatural. One way or another, she knew about the sec