in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete
detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us
sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should;
and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragic
freedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this was
the man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clay
unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made her
shudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead when
she came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged the
dead, if not the living. The pose of the head was unaltered, the chin
upon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep. No
wonder his wife had been deceived. And yet there was something
unfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the living
man; so that Rachel could already marvel that she had not at once
detected this dignity and this distinction, only too foreign to her
husband as she had learnt to know him best, but unattainable in the
noblest save by death. And her eyes had risen to the slice of sky in the
upper half of the window, and at last the tears were rising in her eyes,
when they filled instead with sudden horror and enlightenment.

There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink on
the desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead man's
blood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the newspaper
on the floor beside him was crisp as toast from that which it had hidden
when she saw him last.

"Murdered!" whispered Rachel, breaking her long silence with a gasp.
"The work of thieves!"

The policemen exchanged a rapid glance.