Page:Richard Marsh--The goddess a demon.djvu/132

120 they want with me. They all look at me, and I can hear them clapping. Then it all comes back to the man lying dead upon the floor; that's where it all seems to begin and end. I wonder if I killed him. I wish I knew. It is so strange that I may have killed him and yet not know. I know that he deserved to be killed, but did I do it?"

Glancing round, her eyes rested on the door in the opposite corner which led into Lawrence's bedroom. She crossed to it.

"What's in here?"

She turned the handle and went in. I was at the door within five seconds of her passing through it; Miss Adair, Hume, and the constable still at my heels. We must have presented a spectacle which was not without its comic side as we went scurrying across the carpet But what I saw as I looked into that bedchamber banished from my mind all thoughts of the incongruous; it must, for the time being, have paralysed the muscles of the body; or I do not think that I should have remained for even so long as I did a silent witness of that piteous scene.

One of the first things I realised was the presence in the room of Inspector Symonds. He, in company with a colleague, was submitting the contents of the apartment to an official examination. As Miss Moore entered the two men turned and stared—as well they might. She, on