"That will do. You need not trouble further."
Sweet retired and shut the door very gently. Then he stood on the mat for a few moments, rubbing his nose thoughtfully.
"I could a' sworn I heard somebody shut the front door," he muttered; "and yet Mr. Judd went away more than an hour ago. I suppose I'm getting old and stoopid."
He tried the front door and found it fast. Then he opened the door of the general office and peeped in, but all was darkness there. Satisfied that he must have been mistaken, Sweet made his way downstairs to his cosy little room and lighted his pipe. His wife had gone to bed by this time, and he sat for nearly an hour, smoking and sipping occasionally at his mug of beer, and listening for the sounds of Mr. Hazeldine's departure. But Sweet's listening was in vain; no sound broke the silence. By-and-bye he put his pipe down and finished his beer. The room was warm and the ale was old; Sweet's eyelids drooped, shut, opened and shut again: the night-watchman was asleep. This was no uncommon occurrence during his long, lonely vigils; but he had a happy knack of waking up, alert and fresh, at the end of about half an hour. So it was in the present instance. Sweet awoke with a start and a shiver. The fire had burned low, and the clock pointed to half-past eleven. "The Guv'nor must surely have gone by this time," he said to himself, as he got up and yawned. Then he lighted his lantern and went upstairs.
Placing his lantern on one of the chairs in the corridor, he went to the door of Mr. Hazeldine's room and knocked. He was not going to make a breach in his manners again. But there came no response. He waited a few seconds, and then he opened the door and looked in. Everything was in darkness, as he had expected it would be; both the gas and the fire were out. Sweet shut and locked the door, the key being outside. Then he bolted and barred the heavy front door, and after a final glance into the other offices, he locked them also. His last act was to extinguish the gas in the corridor, after which his duties were over for another hour.
Next morning, a few minutes before seven o'clock, Peggy Lown rang the bell and was duly admitted by Mrs. Sweet. It was Peggy's duty to clean the two general offices and the passage, while Mrs. Sweet herself looked after Mr. Hazeldine's and Mr. Avison's rooms. The first thing Peggy did was to draw up the blinds and let more daylight in through the heavily-barred windows. She had got her broom and her pail of water and was about to set to work, when her eye was caught by a splash of something dark on the floor. She stooped to examine it more closely. Was it nothing more than some red ink which had been spilled, or was it blood? Peggy shuddered involuntarily. At this moment she heard Mrs. Sweet's cough in the corridor, so she went and beckoned to her and brought her in and pointed out the stain on the floor without a word.
Mrs. Sweet stooped as Peggy had done. "It's blood!" she exclaimed next moment, and the two women looked at each other in mute questioning.
Peggy was the first to speak.
"Look at these red finger-marks on this drawer," she said.
"Why, that's Mr. Brancker's drawer! What can it all mean?" queried Mrs. Sweet.