"Because?"
They had come out into the vast, dusky open space before the frozen lake, churned now with many lines of tracks. The pavilion was unlighted now; it looked darker against the spectral whiteness of snow. So quiet was this muffled world that they could hear the snowflakes ticking and rustling in the evergreen-branches.
"When I was raggin' Masters," said H. M., "I thought I'd be very neat and unanswerable. I asked, Was it by accident that the murderer went to and from the crime without leavin' a footprint? And I chuckled in my fatheaded way. But that's it, son; and it's the whole difficulty. That's exactly what happened."
Bennett stared round. He was beginning to experience the same eerie sensation he had felt when he first came into this clearing at dawn: a feeling of being shut away into a twilight place where the present did not exist, and where Marcia Tait dead among the Stuart finery was no less alive than the beribboned ladies, with' their paint and their wired ringlets, who smiled over plumed fans at the card-tables of the merry monarch…
He glanced up sharply.
A light had appeared in the pavilion.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ashes at the Pavilion
Level slits of light showed yellow through the Venetian blinds in the windows of the room on the left hand side of the door: a lonely glow in the midst of the lake. H. M., who had put the dead pipe into his mouth, rattled it against his teeth.
"It might be one of Potter's men still there," he said. "Or it might not. Strike a match and see if there are any fresh tracks…"