“I see,” said Grant. “You were with Sir Terence, then, when this—”
“Nay,” Sir Terence interrupted. “I have been alone since dinner, clearing up some arrears of work. I was in my study there when Mullins called me to tell me what he had discovered. It looks as if there had been a duel. Look at these swords.” Then he turned to his secretary. “I think, Captain Tremayne,” he said gravely, “that you had better report yourself under arrest to your colonel.”
Tremayne stiffened suddenly. “Report myself under arrest?” he cried. “My God, Sir Terence, you don’t believe that I—”
Sir Terence interrupted him. The voice in which he spoke was stern, almost sad; but his eyes gleamed with fiendish mockery the while. It was Polichinelle that spoke—Polichinelle that mocks what time he slays. “What were you doing here?” he asked, and it was like moving the checkmating piece.
Tremayne stood stricken and silent. He cast a desperate upward glance at the balcony overhead. The answer was so easy, but it would entail delivering Richard Butler to his death. Colonel Grant, following his upward glance, beheld Lady O’Moy for the first time. He bowed, swept off his cocked hat, and “Perhaps her ladyship,” he suggested to Sir Terence, “may have seen something.”
“I have already asked her,” replied O’Moy.
And then she herself was feverishly assuring Colonel Grant that she had seen nothing at all, that she had heard a cry and had come out on to the balcony to see what was happening.
“And was Captain Tremayne here when you came out?” asked O’Moy, the deadly jester.
“Ye-es,” she faltered. “I was only a moment or two before yourself.”
“You see?” said Sir Terence heavily to Grant, and Grant, with pursed lips, nodded, his eyes moving from O’Moy to Tremayne.