As they went in she called, "Dick!" and he answered her from the library. There they found him with Kelson and Muriel Tredworth. A glance at their faces told Gifford that they were all in a state of scarcely suppressed excitement.
"I say, Edith, what do you think?" her brother exclaimed. "We've made a rather important discovery. Were you in the middle room of the tower during the dance?"
For a moment his sister did not answer.
"No; I don't think I was," she said, with what seemed to Gifford a certain amount of apprehension in her eyes, although her expression was calm enough.
"Oh, but, my dear girl, you must have been," Morriston insisted vehemently. "We have found the explanation of the stains on Miss Tredworth's dress and on yours."
"You have?" his sister replied, looking at him curiously.
"Yes; beyond all doubt. The mystery is made clear. Come and see."
He led the way across the hall and up the first story of the tower. "There's the explanation," he said, pointing to some dark red patches on the back of a sofa and on the carpet below.
"It is not a pleasant idea," Morriston said; "but you see these marks are directly under the place where the dead man lay in the room above. The blood from his wound evidently ran through the chinks of the flooring on to the beams of the ceiling here and so fell drop by drop on the couch and on any one sitting there. Rather gruesome, but I am sure we must be all very glad to get the simple explanation. The only wonder is that no one thought of it before."
"Muriel was sitting just at that end of the sofa when I proposed to her,"
Kelson said in a low voice to Gifford.