120
in my eyes, and I shuddered. Never before had I felt as I did then.
"Good gracious, you must be a bundle of nerves to make such a fuss. I suppose by any chance it wasn't you who did him in. There's something funny about you somewhere. If you haven't got a guilty conscience, what have you got?"
"It's so so awful! to think of it happening so close to us."
"Oh, stuff! That's for a tale. If you go through life carrying on like that every time a chap's done in, you'll be a howling maniac before you've done."
I said nothing; I just put all the restraint on myself I could, and after a while I pulled myself together.
"I am foolish, I admit. It isn't like me to be upset like this about a trifle." A trifle! when drops of blood seemed to be draining from my heart. "What I don't understand is, if this took place yesterday, why has no one heard of it?"
"Don't I tell you? Tom's been told to hold his tongue, and the staff has been dropped a hint that if the story gets about there'll be trouble. It's quite easy to have a thing like that kept dark. Why, I was once on a steamer going to South Africa when a man was murdered in his berth, and not a passenger knew anything about it till we landed at Cape Town. Then it came out that not only had the man been murdered, but they'd got the chap who did it; they'd kept him locked up somewhere forward all the while."
"Have they any suspicions about who did this?"
"Can't say Tom thinks not. Every blessed thing in the cabin had been turned topsy-turvy; the furniture had been broken open, the woodwork stripped off the walls; someone had been looking for something for all they were worth. What it was they were looking for, and whether they found it, there was nothing to show. Tom thinks not and because they wanted the chap to say where it was, and he wouldn't, they did him in."
"But the whole thing must have taken some time; how was it that no one heard anything suspicious?"
"That's the wonder. The cabin is on the upper dec
