Anyhow, she had agreed.

Audrey and Larry had gone to town, and at eleven o’clock she went out to get the car. But it had a flat tire, and she was no good at that sort of thing. She telephoned to the garage and the night man came around and fixed it. There was a nail in it. When she finally left it was almost twelve o’clock. She drove up as fast as she could, parked the car inside the gates, and walked past the fountain to the playhouse.

She was surprised not to find it lighted; surprised and uneasy. But there was firelight coming through the living-room windows, so she went in.

The door was unlocked, and the fire lit the long hall with the pool opening off it. She went there, to find the room empty but a brisk fire going. By that time she was very nervous, however. She managed to discover a switch and turned the light on. It made her feel better. But there was no sign of Maud, so she walked down the hall and glanced into the swimming pool.

Maud was lying there, dead.

“At least I suppose she was dead,” she said drearily. “She was warm but she had no pulse at all, and she wasn’t breathing. I was too paralyzed to run at first. I remember lifting her hair and seeing that dreadful wound, and I think I was out of my mind for a minute or two. I ran out to the telephone—the one to the house—and took it off the hook. Then I realized what a hole I was in. Don had been killed there, and if I was found with that body I had nobody to prove she had asked me there.”

She lost her head entirely then. All she had touched, aside from the body, was the telephone, the knob on the door, and the light switch. She turned out the light. Then she wiped all three with her handkerchief. She was shaking so that she could scarcely walk. She did not dare even to close the door.

She ran back to her car and got home safe, but she did not go to bed. She walked the floor all night. Suppose Maud had not been dead, and she could have saved her? Suppose those tracks of hers in the snow were seen? Who would believe her? And there was water running into the pool. Why that, with winter close at hand? Then, toward morning that was, she remembered that she had worn a fur scarf, and she could not locate it. It was not in her room or in the hall below. She prepared for the worst. But before dawn she thought of the car, and she found it there on the floor by the driving seat. She almost fainted with relief.

“Did you see the gun?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t even know she had been shot. I thought she had been killed by a blow, and that someone meant to throw her into the pool. Like Don.”