Mr. Quin settled himself more comfortably in his chair. A waiter, flying down the swinging car, deposited cups of soup before them as if by a miracle. Mr. Quin sipped it cautiously.
"You are about to give me one of those wonderful descriptive portraits of yours," he murmured, "that is so, is it not?"
Mr. Satterthwaite beamed on him.
"She is really a marvelous woman," he said. "Sixty, you know--yes, I should say at least sixty. I knew them as girls, she and her sister. Beatrice, that was the name of the elder one. Beatrice and Barbara. I remember them as the Barron girls. Both good-looking and, in those days, very hard up. That was a great many years ago--why, dear me, I was a young man myself then." Mr. Satterthwaite sighed. "There were several lives then between them and the title. Old Lord Stranleigh was a first cousin once removed, I think. Lady Stranleigh's life has been quite a romantic affair. Three unexpected deaths--two of the old man's brothers and a nephew. Then there was the _Uralia_. You remember the wreck of the _Uralia_? She went down off the coast of New Zealand. The Barron girls were on board. Beatrice was drowned. This one, Barbara, was among the few survivors. Six months later old Stranleigh died and she succeeded to the title and came into a considerable fortune. Since then she has lived for one thing only--herself! She has always been the same, beautiful, unscrupulous, completely callous, interested solely in herself. She has had four husbands, and I have no doubt could get a fifth in a minute."
He went on to describe the mission with which he had been entrusted by Lady Stranleigh.
"I thought of running down to Abbot's Mede to see the young lady," he explained. "I--I feel that something ought to be done about the matter. It is impossible to think of Lady Stranleigh as an ordinary mother." He stopped, looking across the table at Mr. Quin.
"I wish you would come with me," he said wistfully. "Would it not be possible?"
"I am afraid not," said Mr. Quin, "but, let me see--Abbot's Mede is in Wiltshire, is it not?"
Mr. Satterthwaite nodded.
"I thought as much. As it happens, I shall be staying not far from Abbot's Mede, at a place you and I both know." He smiled. "You remember that little inn, The Bells and Motley?"
"Of course," cried Mr. Satterthwaite, "you will be there?"
Mr. Quin nodded. "For a week or ten days, possibly longer. If you will come and look me up one day, I shall be delighted to see you."
And somehow or other Mr. Satterthwaite felt strangely comforted by the assurance.
* * * * *
"My dear Miss--er--Margery," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "I assure you that I should not dream of laughing at you."
Margery Gale frowned a little. They were sitting in the large comfortable hall of Abbot's Mede. Margery Gale was a big, squarely built girl. She bore no resemblance to her mother, but took entirely after her father's side of the family, a line of hard-riding country squires. She looked fresh and wholesome and the picture of sanity. Nevertheless, Mr. Satterthwaite was reflecting to himself that the Barrons as a family were all inclined to mental instability. Margery might have inherited her physical appearance from her father and at the same time have inherited some mental kink from her mother's side of the family.
"I wish," said Margery, "that I could get rid of that Casson woman. I don't believe in spiritualism, and I don't like it. She is one of these silly women that run a craze to death. She is always bothering me to have a medium down here."
Mr. Satterthwaite coughed, fidgeted a little in his chair and then said in a judicial manner, "Let me be quite sure that I have all the facts. The first of the--er--phenomena occurred two months ago, I understand."
"About that," agreed the girl. "Sometimes it was a whisper and sometimes it was quite a clear voice, but it always said much the same thing."
"Which was?"
"'_Give back what is not yours. Give back what you have stolen._' On each occasion I switched on the light, but the room was quite empty and there was no one there. In the end I got so nervous that I got Clayton, Mother's maid, to sleep on the sofa in my room."
"And the voice came just the same?"
"Yes, but--and this is what frightens me--Clayton did not hear it."
Mr. Satterthwaite reflected for a minute or two. "Did it come loudly or softly that evening?"
"It was almost a whisper," admitted Margery. "If Clayton was sound asleep, I suppose she would not really have heard it. She wanted me to see a doctor."
The girl laughed bitterly. "But since last night even Clayton believes," she continued.
"What happened last night?"
"I am just going to tell you. I have told no one as yet. I had been out hunting yesterday and we had had a long run. I was dead tired and slept very heavily. I dreamed--a horrible dream--that I had fallen over some iron railings and that one of the spikes was entering slowly into my throat. I woke to find that it was true--there was some sharp point pressing into the side of my neck and at the same time a voice was murmuring softly, '_You have stolen what is mine. This is death._'
"I screamed," continued Margery, "and clutched at the air but there was nothing there. Clayton heard me scream from the room next door where she was sleeping. She came rushing in, and she distinctly felt something brushing past her in the darkness, but she says that, whatever that something was, it was not anything human."
Mr. Satterthwaite stared at her. The girl was obviously very shaken and upset. He noticed on the left side of her throat a small square of sticking plaster. She caught the direction of his gaze and nodded.
"Yes," she said, "it was not imagination, you see."
Mr. Satterthwaite put a question almost apologetically, it sounded so melodramatic. "You don't know of anyone--er--who has a grudge against you?" he asked.
"Of course not," said Margery, "what an idea."
Mr. Satterthwaite started on another line of attack. "What visitors have you had during the last two months?"
"You don't mean just people for week-ends, I suppose? Marcia Keane has been with me all along. She is my best friend and just as keen on horses as I am. Then my cousin Roley Vavasour has been here a good deal."
Mr. Satterthwaite nodded. He suggested that he should see Clayton, the maid. "She has been with you a long time, I suppose?" he asked.
"Donkey's years," said Margery. "She was Mother's and Aunt Beatrice's maid when they were girls. That is why Mother has kept her on, I suppose, although she has got a French maid for herself. Clayton does sewing and pottering little odd jobs."
She took him upstairs and presently Clayton came to them. She was a tall, thin old woman with gray hair neatly parted, and looked the acme of respectability.
"No, sir," she said in answer to Mr. Satterthwaite's inquiries, "I have never heard anything of the house being haunted. To tell you the truth, sir, I thought it was all Miss Margery's imagination until last night. But I actually felt something--brushing by me in the darkness. And I can tell you this, sir, _it was not anything human_. And then there is that wound in Miss Margery's neck. She didn't do that herself, poor lamb."
But her words were suggestive to Mr. Satterthwaite. Was it possible that Margery could have inflicted that wound herself? He had heard of strange cases where girls apparently just as sane and well balanced as Margery had done the most amazing things.
"It will soon heal up," said Clayton. "It's not like this scar of mine."
She pointed to a mark on her own forehead. "That was done forty years ago, sir. I still bear the mark of it."
"It was the time the _Uralia_ went down," put in Margery. "Clayton was hit on the head by a spar, weren't you, Clayton?"
"Yes, miss."
"What do you think yourself, Clayton?" asked Mr. Satterthwaite. "What do you think was the meaning of this attack on Miss Margery?"
"I really should not like to say, sir."
Mr. Satterthwaite read this correctly as the reserve of the well-trained servant. "What do you really think, Clayton?" he said persuasively.
"I think, sir, that something very wicked must have been done in this house, and that until that is wiped out there won't be any peace."
The woman spoke gravely, and her faded blue eyes met his steadily.
Mr. Satterthwaite went downstairs rather disappointed. Clayton evidently held the orthodox view, a deliberate "haunting" as a consequence of some evil deed in the past. Mr. Satterthwaite himself was not so easily satisfied. The phenomena had only taken place in the last two months. Had only taken place since Marcia Keane and Roley Vavasour had been there. He must find out something about these two. It was possible that the whole thing was a practical joke. But he shook his head, dissatisfied with that solution. The thing was more sinister than that. The post had just come in and Margery was opening and reading her letters. Suddenly she gave an exclamation.
"Mother is too absurd," she said. "Do read this." She handed the letter to Mr. Satterthwaite.