“Well, I never had before,” Mr. Weatherley went on.  “It really seems quite amazing that that one blow right on the head should have done it.  He lay there quite still afterwards and it made me sick to look at him.  All the time, though, I kept on telling myself that if I had not been there he would have hurt Fenella.  That kept me quite cool.  Afterwards, I put the club carefully back in the case, pushed him a little under the sofa, and then I stopped to think for a moment.  I was quite clever, Chetwode.  The window was open through which the man had come, so I locked the door on the inside, stepped out of the window, came in at the front door with my latchkey, crept upstairs, undressed quickly and got into bed.  The funny part of it all was, Chetwode,” he concluded, “that nobody ever really found the body.”

“You don’t suppose that you could have dreamed it all, do you?” Arnold asked.

Mr. Weatherley laughed contemptuously.

“What an absurd idea!” he exclaimed.  “What a perfectly absurd idea!  Besides, although it did disappear, they came up and told me that there was a man lying in the boudoir.  You understand now how it all happened,” he went on.  “It seemed to me quite natural at the time.  Still, when the morning came I realized that I had killed a man.  It’s a horrid thing to kill a man, Chetwode!”

“Of course it is, sir,” Arnold said, sympathetically.  “Still, I don’t see what else you could have done.”

Mr. Weatherley beamed.

“I am glad to hear you say that, Chetwode,” he declared, “very glad.  Still, I didn’t want to go to prison, you know, so a few days afterwards I went away.  I meant to hide for quite a long time.  I—­I don’t know what I’m doing back here.”

He looked around the office like a trapped animal.

“I didn’t mean to come back yet, Chetwode!” he exclaimed.  “Don’t leave me!  Do you hear?  Don’t leave me!”

“Only for one second, sir,” Arnold replied, taking an invoice from the desk.  “They are wanting this in the warehouse.”

Arnold stepped rapidly across to Mr. Jarvis’s desk.

“Telephone home for his wife to come and bring a doctor,” he ordered.  “Quick!”

“He’s out of his mind!” Jarvis gasped.

“Stark mad,” Arnold agreed.

When he re-entered the office, Mr. Weatherley was sitting muttering to himself.  Arnold came over and sat opposite to him.

“Mrs. Weatherley is calling round presently, sir,” he announced.  “You’ll be glad to see her again.”

Mr. Weatherley went deadly pale.

“Does she know?” he moaned.

“She knows that some one was hurt,” Arnold said.  “As a matter of fact,” he continued, “I don’t think the man could have been dead.  We were all out of the room for about five minutes, and when we came back he was gone.  I think that he must have got up and walked away.”

“You don’t think that I murdered him, then?” Mr. Weatherley inquired, anxiously.