he window and deepest in shadow.

He stepped across to the window and gently raised one of the blinds. The
light of an August sun penetrated through the screen of trees in front of
the house and revealed the interior of the room more clearly. Rolfe was
amazed at its size. From the window to the couch at the other end of the
room, where the body lay, was nearly thirty feet. Glancing down the
apartment, he noticed that it was really two rooms, divided in the middle
by folding doors. These doors folded neatly into a slightly protruding
ridge or arch almost opposite the door by which he had entered, and were
screened from observation by heavy damask curtains, which drooped over
the archway slightly into the room.

Evidently the deceased judge had been in the habit of using the divided
rooms as a single apartment, for the heavier furniture in both halves of
it was of the same pattern. The chairs and tables were of heavy,
ponderous, mid-Victorian make, and they were matched by a number of
old-fashioned mahogany sideboards and presses, arranged methodically at
regular intervals on both sides of the room. Rolfe, as his eye took in
these articles, wondered why Sir Horace Fewbanks had bought so many. One
sideboard, a vast piece of furniture fully eight feet long, had a whisky
decanter and siphon of soda water on it, as though Sir Horace had served
himself with refreshments on his return to the house. The tops of the
other sideboards were bare, and the presses, use in such a room Rolfe was
at a loss to conjecture, were locked up. The antique sombre uniformity
of the furniture as a whole was broken at odd intervals by several
articles of bizarre modernity, including a few daring French prints,
which struck an odd note of incongruity in such a room.

The murdered man had been laid on an old-fashioned sofa at the end of
this double apartment which was furthest from the window. Rolfe walked
slowly over the thick Turkey carpets and rugs with which the floor was
covered, glanced at the sofa curiously, and then turned down the sheet
from the dead man's face.

At the time of his death Sir Horace Fewbanks was 58 years of age, but
since death the grey bristles had grown so rapidly through his
clean-shaven face that he looked much older. The face showed none of the
wonted placidity of death. The mouth was twisted in an ugly fashion, as
though the murdered man had endeavoured to cry for help and had been
attacked and killed while doing so.