"Little Kate, he said, "be damned. Look here, John, do you know anything about her? Do you ever think of anything except your own dreams? She's twenty-one, she runs this house for you, she's rather a beauty, and she's never been farther afield than London in her life. Between you and Maurice, this whole house is run on dreams and shadows. Of course you haven't seen her. You've never even looked at her."
"You were saying?" Bohun prompted politely.
Willard seemed to debate something in his mind.
"This. That you don't even know what Marcia was like, or why anybody should want to kill her. And you may not feel the devilishness in this house. She inspired devilishness wherever she went. If you didn't love her, she was just as willing to have you-or anybody else hate her." He struck the arm of the chair. Momentarily his queer yellow-brown eyes were gleaming. "Oh, yes. I know. She would help it along; she would touch and prod and crack the whip. And as for us, we poor striped brutes went through the paper hoops and climbed up on the perches, and usually she had only to fire a blank cartridge when we got unruly. I say usually.
"Now I'm going to tell you what happened after dinner, and why I wasn't surprised at murder.
"Marcia insisted on a tour of the house by moonlight; with only Maurice carrying a candle, and explaining the romance of the White Priory. Of course Maurice was delighted. The rest of us went along. Rainger was too jocose, too attentive to the Honorable Louise; Katharine was with me. And Marcia had a word for all of us. Oh, she was vivid enough. She would sometimes take the candle from Maurice to show her eyes and her smile when she dazzled Maurice; she even got a spark out of Rainger, who was stolid enough, but he snatched up a silver cape of hers when it nearly touched the floor. The girls she treated with a kind of motherly sarcasm. I suppose I was down in the dumps — I don't know why. She chaffed me about what a poor Charles the Second I would make. This mind you, when I was suddenly beginning to realize for the first time just how the part should be played. In those dark rooms, when you had that uncanny sense that people had just stepped out of them: I got it, I got the feel of a role such as I've never had since I played Peter Ibbetson! I had even begun to imagine the crashing success with the audience.’
"Then we came to the Charles-the-Second Room." Willard seemed to feel his audience even then. He turned to Bennett.
"This will be gibberish to you, I fear. The Charles-the-Second Room is the one our friend Bohun here occupies now. It is kept much as it was. The feature of the place is a staircase in the wall, between the inner and outer walls, which goes down to a door opening on what is now a modern side porch-the porch by which we came into the house. The door (it's not a secret door, of course) is at the rear end of the porch. It was built so that Charles could go out and down the lawns to the pavilion without being observed leaving by any main entrance."
"Yes, of course," said Bohun impatiently. "Well?"
"Maurice," Willard continued, "was showing us the secret staircase. I had seen it before, of course. But Marcia dragged me out on the little stone landing when the others crowded out there. It was draughty, and there was only the light of the candle Maurice was holding up. It is a very steep, narrow, and long flight of steps. I remember thinking it looked dangerously like a precipice. Then I don't know, nobody knows, whether it was a draught that blew out the candle, or whether somebody jogged Maurice's arm, or what happened. But the candle went out. I heard somebody giggle in the dark. Not laugh, but giggle, and that was worse. Then I felt somebody pitch against me. I caught Marcia just as she had tripped headlong down those stairs."