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taken the trouble later to probe into the matter of the goddess Kali. Strangely enough, this divinity, at the time, interested her far more than the nature of her uncle’s indiscretion, or the part played by the beautiful native dancer. Kali, she discovered, was a goddess of destruction and death. She was black, had four arms, and the palms of her hands were red. Her face and breast were smeared with blood, and blood dripped from her tongue which protruded from her revolting, fang-like teeth. Formerly, human sacrifice was a part of her ritual. The sacrificial victim was imprisoned in her temple at sunset, and in the morning he was dead. Kali had sucked his blood during the night. Ghastly as this description was to Eileen in those impressionable years, it acquired some grander horror from the vague association with her Uncle John. Whatever had happened between Kali and her uncle, he had at least survived the ordeal triumphantly and bore no traces of the encounter.
    This reversion of her thoughts to that early story of her uncle’s indiscretion, and the sudden recollection of the horror of Kali, began to fill Eileen with a vague and increasing terror. All sorts of tales of Eastern deities, of curses and mummies and rifled tombs, sacrilege and the unescapable vengeance of strange gods flitted incoherently through her mind. She decided that the best thing to do was to go to bed, try to sleep, and see what the morning would bring.
    The morning brought Runnacles, the gardener, at seven o’clock to Old Hall Farm. It was an hour earlier than his specified time for commencing work. He demanded to see his mistress at once, and Fanny Raymer ran upstairs, wakened Eileen, and told her of Runnacles’ unusual request. Eileen, immediately aware that the gardener was the bearer of important news, slipped on her dressing-gown and came down to hear what he had to say.
    Runnacles’ information was brief and momentous. The dead bodies of Mr. John Thurlow and Mr. Clarry Martin had been found lying within a few feet of one another on the piece of waste land called “Cobbler’s Corner,” about half a mile to the north of Yarham village. They had been discovered by Ephraim Noy, who lived in the new bungalow, not a hundred yards from Cobbler’s Corner. He had informed the village constable, and the village constable’s wife had immediately informed Runnacles’ wife. That was all. Runnacles could furnish no further details beyond the fact that the village constable had at once cycled out to Cobbler’s Corner. Before leaving, he had said he would call at Old Hall Farm as soon as practicable and give Miss Thurlow full particulars of the tragedy.
    On learning this terrible news, Eileen Thurlow did not faint, as one might have expected of a woman of her sensitive and delicate stamp. She quietly dismissed Runnacles and went back to her bedroom to dress. Her mind, by some strange process, seemed to her to have become suddenly detached from her body and to be floating, calmly and quite alert, in some region not actually mundane. As she dressed, she happened to glance out of her bedroom window into the garden below. The sky was cloudless, and the garden was all bright and sparkling in the cool morning sunshine. Her uncle was dead. Clarry Martin was dead. In the language of spiritualism, they had passed over. Nature didn’t seem to heed. Nature seemed frigidly remote and indescribably beautiful. A great mystery! 
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Chapter Three
    Anthony Vereker, known as Algernon unabbreviated to his friends, looked critically at the numerous landscape sketches both in oil and watercolour that he had completed since his arrival in Yarham, and then carefully packed them all away with his painting gear in a leather trunk in his bedroom. This operation of putting away his work was performed with some of the solemnity of a funeral rite. For several days he had not handled a brush or opened a sketch book. His inspiration