"Beauchamp, I wish you would remain with Mr. Maynard and myself for a little," he said. "There is a point on which I want to fortify myself with your opinion. We can walk back to the Manor afterwards."
Enid began to pout and toss her head, but she knew every phase of her idolized father's moods, and one glance at the network of creases round the keen eyes was sufficient to quell her incipient mutiny. The appearance of those filaments on the stern, ascetic face was a sure danger-signal that her father was not to be trifled with—that the active brain was at work on some serious problem. She put her ice-plate down and, bidding the Lieutenant "make himself generally useful," ran away to overtake the fast-receding party.
She had hardly departed when Montague Maynard came bustling up, wiping his brow with a silk handkerchief. He stopped for an instant to order the wondering servants to pack up the crockery ready for the cart and to get home as quick as they could, and then he turned to Mr. Mallory, while Reggie, with instinctive modesty, fell back a pace or two.
"Aunt Sally is a masterpiece; I'll tell you how she did it later," he said, his eyebrows uplifted inquiringly in the direction of the young torpedo-boat commander.
"It is all right. He's wanted," interpolated Mr. Mallory shortly.
"Well, then this is what I have done," the screw magnate went on in a hoarse undertone. "I have sent a footman into the town direct for the police-sergeant, and another to hurry up one of the local medicos. All these maids will have skedaddled before either the sergeant or the doctor can turn up. Now shall we go and have a look at the—the place? You have no idea who the poor fellow is, I suppose?"
"I am not sure; it is on that point that I want Beauchamp to corroborate me," was the reply. And, calling Reggie forward, Mr. Mallory told him, as the three went towards the swamps under the embankment, of the gruesome discovery he had made, and how he wished to learn if his view of the dead man's identity coincided with his own.
No more was said till they had picked their way over the firmest foothold they could find to the pool where the horrible sight awaited them. The body lay half in and half out of the water, the upturned face being afloat while the remains below the shoulders were embedded in the ooze at the brink and nearly concealed by the reeds.
"Miss Maynard was right, you see, as to what the passenger called out from the train—'the face in the pool,'" said Mr. Mallory. "The lower limbs were probably invisible up there. Now, Beauchamp; do you recognize the victim of this tragedy?"
Reggie looked blankly down at the features about which there lingered none of the majesty of death—mean, commonplace features, which nevertheless might have had their attraction for the unsophisticated by reason of a certain sensual fullness of lip and smoothness of the now marble-white skin. The wide-open eyes, staring skyward, conveyed the impression of sudden, awful fear.