"It's the police."
I sat up in bed. "The police!—why?—what?"
"Shissh! come quickly and don't make a noise," breathed Miss Brown.
I hurried into a shooting-jacket and slippers and joined the lady on the landing. She carried a candle and was adequately if somewhat grotesquely clad in a dressing-gown and an eider-down quilt secured about her waist by a knotted bath-towel. On her head she wore a large black hat. She put her finger to her lips and led the way downstairs. The hall was empty.
"That's curious," said Miss Brown. "There were eighteen mounted policemen in here just now. I was talking to the Inspector—such a nice young man, an intimate friend of the late Sir Christopher Wren, who, he informs me privately, did not kill Cock Robin."
She paused, winked and then suddenly dealt me three hearty smacks—one on the shoulder, one on the arm and one in the small of the back. I removed myself hastily out of range.
"Tarantulas, or Peruvian ant-bears, crawling all over you," Miss Brown explained. "Fortunate I saw them in time, as their suck is fatal in ninety-nine cases out of a million, or so Garibaldi says in the Origin of Species." She sniffed. "Tell me, do you smell blood?"
I told her that I did not.
"I do," she said, "quite close at hand too. Yum-yum, I like warm blood." She looked at me through half-closed eyelids. "I should think you'd bleed very prettily, very prettily."