"Well, I gripped the club in my right hand," Mr. Weatherley explained, seizing a ruler from the table, "like this, and I ran in upon him. I took him rather by surprise—he hadn't expected anything of the sort. He had one shot at me and missed. I felt the bullet go scorching past my cheek—like this."
Mr. Weatherley struck the side of his face sharply with the flat of his hand.
"He had another go at me but it was too late,—I was there upon him. He held out his arm but I was too quick. I didn't seem to hit very hard the first time but the club was heavy. His foot slipped on the marble hearthstone and he went. He fell with a thud. Have you ever killed a man, Chetwode?"
"Never, sir," Arnold answered, his voice shaking a little.
"Well, I never had before," Mr. Weatherley went on. "It really seems quite amazing that that one blow right on the head should have done it. He lay there quite still afterwards and it made me sick to look at him. All the time, though, I kept on telling myself that if I had not been there he would have hurt Fenella. That kept me quite cool. Afterwards, I put the club carefully back in the case, pushed him a little under the sofa, and then I stopped to think for a moment. I was quite clever, Chetwode. The window was open through which the man had come, so I locked the door on the inside, stepped out of the window, came in at the front door with my latchkey, crept upstairs, undressed quickly and got into bed. The funny part of it all was, Chetwode," he concluded, "that nobody ever really found the body."
"You don't suppose that you could have dreamed it all, do you?" Arnold asked.
Mr. Weatherley laughed contemptuously.
"What an absurd idea!" he exclaimed. "What a perfectly absurd idea! Besides, although it did disappear, they came up and told me that there was a man lying in the boudoir. You understand now how it all happened," he went on. "It seemed to me quite natural at the time. Still, when the morning came I realized that I had killed a man. It's a horrid thing to kill a man, Chetwode!"
"Of course it is, sir," Arnold said, sympathetically. "Still, I don't see what else you could have done."
Mr. Weatherley beamed.