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surrounding it, so that what had happened was visible at once. Appleby walked up to the place. He had to inspect it only for a moment before suddenly stiffening. Then he turned to his companion. ‘I think you may feel you know,’ he said, ‘just how to interpret that ?’
    That was a very simple design which had been boldly scratched on the exposed surface with a sharp instrument.
     
    For a moment both men looked at this in silence. Appleby recorded to himself an impression that Martyn Ashmore’s breathing was for the moment not perfectly regular. But when the old man spoke it was detachedly and with a faint irony.
    ‘Perhaps it isn’t as recent as it looks? A mason’s mark, would you say? They were still very fond of them in the sixteenth century.’
    ‘No doubt.’ Appleby’s tone indicated that he took no pleasure in this trifling. ‘But if that is a medieval stonemason’s mark, Mr Ashmore, what he chose to sign himself with was the Cross of Lorraine. It was to have other associations in a later age.’
    ‘Capital plan!’ Lord Ampersand was constitutionally averse to small cash disbursements. ‘And no heel-taps, Archie. We’ll go and tell your mother.’

 
     
4
     
    The breeze which had begun to blow earlier was still rising, and it made the present perch of Appleby and his host a chilly one. It was beginning to whistle in the battlements – and also to sigh subtly or whisper in the innumerable small crevices of the ancient roof. Appleby’s last words had been followed by a silence in which he had believed himself to be listening only to these murmurings of external nature. But now he suddenly raised his head and listened in another fashion.
    ‘Can there be anybody else up here?’ he asked. ‘Somebody who for some reason came up before us? I haven’t gathered whether you have many servants about the place.’
    ‘Servants?’ Ashmore produced a contemptuous exclamation. ‘I do without them entirely, praise the Lord! Do you know the kind of wages they ask for nowadays? Totally impossible!’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby was still listening. At the same time he was reflecting that, as the owner of what was clearly a substantial estate in this particular part of England, Martyn Ashmore, regardless of other sources of wealth, could not be other than an extremely prosperous man. Indeed he had himself hinted as much. Of a thoroughly irrational element in his parsimony there could be no doubt whatever.
    ‘But I think you’re right,’ Ashmore said. He had cocked his head on one side in an attitude of listening. But if this somehow enhanced the effect of an unnatural agelessness in his features – rather as if a death-mask had been canted over on its stand – it also suggested an almost unimpaired capacity for alert attention to his surroundings when he was minded that way. His senses, Appleby thought, had remained with him more certainly than his wits. And now he turned to Appleby and nodded. ‘Not a doubt of it.’
    Appleby surveyed their situation. Even the principal façade of the house was without regularity, and one consequence of this was apparent at their present level. On their left hand as they faced outwards towards the park the battlemented effect abruptly left off, so that the roof structure terminated merely in impassable eaves and a gutter. But on their right a cheerfully incongruous Gothicizing had been carried out, with the result that there were more battlements, and a narrow leaded walk behind them. Along this one could move in very reasonable safety. The route would take one round a corner of the roof. And it was from this direction that something like the sound of footfalls had come.
    ‘Nobody can have slipped up behind us,’ Appleby said. ‘If there’s anybody there, he’s been up here for some time. If you don’t mind, we’ll go and have a look.’
    But this proposal proved unnecessary. Even as Appleby spoke, the figure of a man appeared round the angle of the roof,