Why, Scottie, you're not easily scared."

    Scottie clicked his lips. He was quite serious.

    "I don't know. I'm not nervy; never was. Not afraid of anything human. It was just—well—shooting stars used to give me the same creep. It was a fear. I let it out yesterday to Merrivan, the Community-Barker—"

    Andy grinned at the tribute to Mr Merrivan as the advertising agent of, and guide to, Beverley Green.

    "Not a bad fellow. He's forgotten how to learn, but that comes with fat. Not a bad fellow. He said the same thing—after I'd said it. Agreed with me. Maybe he'd agree with anybody; he's accommodating. But it seemed to me that I'd put into words all that he would have thought if the Lord had given him the power of thinking. Macleod, go and stay a day or so in Beverley Green and smell it yourself—something brooding, the dead silence before the flash of lightning that hits your house—and here's the train. If you're called to give evidence about me, say the good word."

    "Have I ever said anything against you, Scottie?" asked Andy reproachfully. "Good luck to the alibi!"

    Scottie winked.

    It was at that moment that the train stopped and Stella Nelson got out. Andy's eyes followed her until she was out of sight.

    "And she's in it somewhere," whispered Scottie, almost in his ear. "So long, Macleod."

    So Scottie went off to the bar of justice, a less disastrous experience than he had anticipated, for his alibi was well and truly laid, and the evidence of four apparently respectable persons who were playing cards with him at the moment the crime was committed was unshaken by the scorn of the prosecution and unmoved by the deft questions of a sceptical judge.

    Andy had promised himself the pleasure of a moonlight drive across country to the holiday place whence he had been dragged. Evidence of arrest would be given by the inspector in charge of the case, to whom the receiving of the prisoner from the county policeman constituted arrest. If Andy's presence was necessary in court it would only mean a day in town.

    Scottie's words had bitten into the surface of his mind as acid bites into a plate. When he went back to the inn where he had garaged the car he had no intention of leaving Beverley, although he was embarrassed to discover that his identity was public property, and the sparse but human population of Beverley turned to look awefully after him as he passed.

    If he had no intention of leaving Beverley that night, he had less thought of paying a visit to Beverley Green. Subconsciously he may have already decided his action, but consciously he was obeying a sudden impulse, when, after dinner, he had his car out and drove towards the happy community. He turned at the guest-house, shut off his engine, and extinguished his lights. The moon was at its full, and its magic was working powerfully within him.

    He stood for a long time greedily absorbing the delicate beauty of the scene, and then he crossed the green, and again subconsciously his feet carried him in the direction of the Nelson home.

    An oblong of yellow light suddenly appeared; the door had opened, and he stopped in the shadow of a clump of rhododendrons, one of many that edged the village green.

    He saw a man come out, and there was something in his gait that immediately attracted Andy's attention. It was literally true of Andy that his study of mankind was man. A grimace, a movement of the hands, the very way a man sat down to table and unfolded his napkin, had a meaning to this student.

    "There goes one who is in a very bad temper," he thought, and watched the form of Arthur Wilmot as he strode wrathfully along the gravelled road. He threw open the gate of his own house and paused. As if a thought had struck him, he came out again, closed the gate, and continued his walk, turning into a house that stood at the corner of the lane—Mr Merrivan's house, Andy noted, and remembered that they were uncle and nephew.

    He walked on, still keeping to the shadow of the bushes. Something—a twinge of apprehension—had communicated itself to him. He was imaginative in a practical way, but he was certainly not as susceptible as Scottie claimed to be.