Sir Vernon’s face had flushed when Joan began to speak, and he had seemed on the point of breaking in upon her. But he had evidently thought better of it; for he let her have her say. But now he answered coldly, and with a suppressed but obvious irritation.

“My dear Joan, you know quite well that this marriage has been an understood thing among us all. I don’t pretend to know what fancy has got into your head just lately. But, at all events, let us hear no more of it to-night. Already what you have said has quite spoilt the evening for me.”

Then, as Joan tried to speak, he added, “No, please, no more about it now. If you wish you can speak to me about it in the morning.”

Joan still tried to say something; but at this point Lucas cut quickly into the conversation. Actor-managers, he said, had all the luck. You would not find a poor devil of a playwright with the best part of a million to leave to his descendants. And then, with obvious relief, the rest helped to steer the talk back to less dangerous topics. Sir Vernon seemed to forget his annoyance and launched into a stream of old theatrical reminiscence, Lucas capping each of his stories with another. The cheerfulness of the latter part of the evening was, perhaps, a trifle forced, and there were two, Joan herself and young Ellery, who took in it only the smallest possible part. But Prinsep, Lucas, and Carter Woodman made up for these others; and an outsider would have pronounced Sir Vernon’s party a complete success.

There was no withdrawal of the ladies that evening, for, after her discomfiture, Joan made no move towards the drawing-room. In the end it was Prinsep who broke up the party with a word to Sir Vernon. “Come, uncle,” he said, “ten o’clock and time for our roystering to end. I have work I must do about the theatre and it’s time some of us were getting home.”

Then Joan seemed to wake up to a sense of her duties, and Sir Vernon was promptly bustled off upstairs, the guests gradually taking their leave.

Most of them had not far to go. Lucas had his car waiting to run him back to his house at Hampstead. Ellery had rooms in Chelsea, and announced his intention, as the night was fine, of walking back by the parks. The George Brooklyns and the Woodmans, who lived in the outer suburbs at Banstead and Esher, were staying the night in town, at the famous Cunningham, on the opposite side of Piccadilly, the best hotel in London in the estimation of foreign potentates and envoys as well as of Londoners themselves. George Brooklyn, saying that he had an appointment, asked Woodman to see his wife home, and left Marian and the Woodmans outside the front door of the Piccadilly theatre, while they crossed the road towards their hotel.

The guests having departed, Liskeard House began to settle down for the night. On the ground floor, indeed, there began a scurry of servants clearing up after the dinner. On the first floor Joan, having seen Sir Vernon to his room, sat in the long-deserted drawing-room, talking over the evening’s events with her friend, Mary Woodman, and reiterating, to a sympathetic listener, her determination never to marry John Prinsep. Meanwhile, upstairs on the second floor, John Prinsep sat at his desk in his remote study with a heavy frown on his face, very unlike the seemingly light-hearted and amiable expression he had worn all the evening. Sir Vernon’s birthday party was over, but there were strange things preparing for the night.

Chapter III.
Murder

John Prinsep was a man who valued punctuality and cultivated regular habits, both in himself and in others. At 10.15 punctually each night a servant came to him to collect any late letters for the post. Thereafter, unless some visitor had to be shown up, he was left undisturbed, and no one entered his flat on the second floor of Liskeard House until the next morning. The servants, who slept on the floor above, had access to it by a staircase of their own, and did not need to pass through Prinsep’s quarters.