"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you and him. I hate you!"
His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day; the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there. Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.
He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's voice or a woman's, but echoing clearly across the deserted garden, he had heard a scream from the house.
It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on it all the curtains were close drawn—or at all but one.
As Neil reached the house he saw that the middle window was thrown high and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards' library.
Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room, sparsely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned, crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden rug.
Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the bowl and the white mass of crushed flowers, and then something else, something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.
One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat, gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures swayed back and forth.
"Who's there?" Neil cried.
Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to, for just then the two men who seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.