Jon Hagadorn

Everybody's damned inconsiderate nowadays!'

"'Not that I mind,' said Bondo, valiantly.

"'Why should I?'

"'I should,' said her father.

"'I should mind very much.

"'I should dream things, you know.

Spectral hands and clanking chains.'

Well, said Bundle, great-aunt Louise died in your bed.

I wonder you don't see her spook hovering over you.

I do sometimes, said Lord Catterham, shuddering, especially after lobster.

Well, thank heavens I'm not superstitious, declared Bundle.

Yet that evening, as she sat in front of her bedroom fire, a slim, pajamaed figure, she found her thoughts reverting to that cheery, vacuous young man, Jerry Wade.

Impossible to believe that anyone so full of the joy of living could deliberately have committed suicide.

No, the other solution must be the right one.

He'd taken a sleeping draught, and by a pure mistake had swallowed an overdose.

That was possible.

She did not fancy that Jerry Wade had been overburdened in an intellectual capacity.

Her gaze shifted to the mantelpiece, and she began thinking about the story of the clocks.

Her maid had been full of that, having just been primed by the second housemaid.

She had added a detail which apparently Treadwell had not thought worthwhile retailing to Lord Ketterham, but which had piqued Bundle's curiosity.