"Tell me about last night."

"Well, Mr. Holmes, I supped there, as the vicar has said, and my
elder brother George proposed a game of whist afterwards. We sat
down about nine o'clock. It was a quarter-past ten when I moved
to go. I left them all round the table, as merry as could be."

"Who let you out?"

"Mrs. Porter had gone to bed, so I let myself out. I shut the
hall door behind me. The window of the room in which they sat
was closed, but the blind was not drawn down. There was no
change in door or window this morning, or any reason to think
that any stranger had been to the house. Yet there they sat,
driven clean mad with terror, and Brenda lying dead of fright,
with her head hanging over the arm of the chair. I'll never get
the sight of that room out of my mind so long as I live."

"The facts, as you state them, are certainly most remarkable,"
said Holmes. "I take it that you have no theory yourself which
can in any way account for them?"

"It's devilish, Mr. Holmes, devilish!" cried Mortimer Tregennis.
"It is not of this world. Something has come into that room
which has dashed the light of reason from their minds. What
human contrivance could do that?"

"I fear," said Holmes, "that if the matter is beyond humanity it
is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural