"It wasn't," Rainger went on, his eyes never moving while he spoke with sudden sharpness, "it wasn't any unknown London admirer who sent that. Take a look at the address. Miss Marcia Tait, Suite 12, The Hertford, Hamilton Place, W. 1. Only half-a-dozen people know she intended to come here. No report could have got around even now, and yet this box was mailed last night before she had even come here. One of her — we'll say her friends sent this. One of us. Why?"
After a silence Bohun said violently: "It looks to me like a joke in damned bad taste. Anybody who knows Marcia would know she never eats sweets. And this cheap tuppenny affair, with a nude on the cover-" he stopped.
"Yes. Do you think," said Willard, and slowly knocked his knuckles on the box, "it might have been intended as a warning of some sort?"
"Are you trying to tell me," Bohun snapped, "that those chocolates are poisoned?"
Rainger was looking at him with a dull stare. "Well, well, well," he said, and mouthed his cigar in unpleasant mirth. "Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody said anything about poison except you. You're either too much of a fool or you're too discerning. Very well. If you think there's nothing wrong with them, why don't you eat one?"
"All right," said Bohun, after a pause. "By God, I will!" And he lifted the cover off the box.
"Steady, John," Willard said. He laughed, and the sound of that deep, common-sense mockery restored them for a moment to sane values. "Now look here, old boy. It's no good getting the wind up over nothing at all. We're acting like a pack of fools. There's probably nothing whatever wrong with the box. If you think there is, have it sent to be analyzed. If you don't, eat all you like.
Bohun nodded. He took a dropsical-looking chocolate from the box, and there was a curious light in his eyes when he looked round the group. He smiled thinly.
"Right," he said. "As a matter of fact, we're all going to eat one."
High up in the dingy room at the War Office, Bennett paused in his narrative as this time the gong-voice of Big Ben clanged out the quarter-hour. He jumped a little. The remembrance had been almost as real, while he stared at the hypnotic light on H. M.'s desk as the room here. Again he became aware of H. M.'s sour moon-face blinking in the gloom.