It was three o’clock, and at three o’clock yesterday Antony and Cayley had found the body.  At a few minutes after three, he had been looking out of the window of the adjoining room, and had been surprised suddenly to find the door open and Cayley behind him.  He had vaguely wondered at the time why he had expected the door to be shut, but he had had no time then to worry the thing out, and he had promised himself to look into it at his leisure afterwards.  Possibly it meant nothing; possibly, if it meant anything, he could have found out its meaning by a visit to the office that morning.  But he had felt that he would be more likely to recapture the impressions of yesterday if he chose as far as possible the same conditions for his experiment.  So he had decided that three o’clock that afternoon should find him once more in the office.

As he went into the room, followed by Bill, he felt it almost as a shock that there was now no body of Robert lying there between the two doors.  But there was a dark stain which showed where the dead man’s head had been, and Antony knelt down over it, as he had knelt twenty-four hours before.

“I want to go through it again,” he said.  “You must be Cayley.  Cayley said he would get some water.  I remember thinking that water wasn’t much good to a dead man, and that probably he was only too glad to do anything rather than nothing.  He came back with a wet sponge and a handkerchief.  I suppose he got the handkerchief from the chest of drawers.  Wait a bit.”

He got up and went into the adjoining room; looked round it, pulled open a drawer or two, and, after shutting all the doors, came back to the office.

“The sponge is there, and there are handkerchiefs in the top right-hand drawer.  Now then, Bill, just pretend you’re Cayley.  You’ve just said something about water, and you get up.”

Feeling that it was all a little uncanny, Bill, who had been kneeling beside his friend, got up and walked out.  Antony, as he had done on the previous day, looked up after him as he went.  Bill turned into the room on the right, opened the drawer and got the handkerchief, damped the sponge and came back.

“Well?” he said wonderingly.

Antony shook his head.

“It’s all different,” he said.  “For one thing, you made a devil of a noise and Cayley didn’t.”

“Perhaps you weren’t listening when Cayley went in?”

“I wasn’t.  But I should have heard him if I could have heard him, and I should have remembered afterwards.”

“Perhaps Cayley shut the door after him.”

“Wait!”

He pressed his hand over his eyes and thought.  It wasn’t anything which he had heard, but something which he had seen.  He tried desperately hard to see it again ....  He saw Cayley getting up, opening the door from the office, leaving it open and walking into the passage, turning to the door on the right, opening it, going in, and then—­What did his eyes see after that?  If they would only tell him again!