mine these
rooms at once."

Mr. Manley went to the door of the smoking-room and was about to unlock
it, when Dr. Thornhill, a big, bluff man of fifty-five, bustled in. Mr.
Manley introduced him to Mr. Flexen; then he unlocked the door and
opened it.

The doctor was leading the way into the smoking-room when Mr. Flexen
stepped smartly in front of him and said: "Please stay outside all of
you. I'll make the examination myself first."

He spoke quietly, but in the tone of a man used to command.

"But, for anything we know, his lordship may still be alive," said Dr.
Thornhill in a somewhat blustering tone, and pushing forward. "As his
medical adviser, it's my duty to make sure at once."

"I'll tell you whether Lord Loudwater is alive or not. Don't let any one
cross the threshold, Perkins," said Mr. Flexen, with quiet decision.

Perkins laid a hand on the doctor's arm, and the doctor said: "A nice way
of doing things! Arbuthnot would have given his first attention to his
lordship!"

"I'm going to," said Mr. Flexen quietly.

He went to the dead man, looked in his pale face, lifted his hand, let
it fall, and said: "Been dead hours."

Then he examined carefully the position of the knife. He was more than a
minute over it. Then he drew it gingerly from the wound by the ring at
the end of it. It was one of these Swedish knives, the blades of which
are slipped into the handle when they are not being used.

"I think that's the knife that lay, open, in the big ink-stand in the
library. We used it as a paper-knife, and to cut string with," said Mr.
Manley, who was watching him with most careful attention.

"It may have some evidence on the handle," said Mr. Flexen, still holding
it by the ring, and he drove the point of it into the pad of blotting
paper on which Mr. Manley had been wont to write letters at the murdered
man's dictation.

"And how am I to tell whether the wound was self-inflicted, or not?"
cried the doctor in an aggrieved tone.

"If you will get some of the servants, you can remove the body to any
room convenient and make your examination. It's a clean stab into the
heart, and it looks to me as if the person who used that knife had some
knowledge of anatomy. Most people who strike for the heart get the middle
of the left lung," said Mr. Flexen.

So saying, he gently drew the easy chair, in which the body was huddled,
nearer the door by its back. Mr. Manley bade Holloway fetch Wilkins and
two of the gr