THE wind came howling from the north across the vast grey-green stretch of the marsh. It had blown all day, menacingly, working Emily Varney up into an ever- increasing state of tension and vague foreboding. Normally she loved the spreading marsh, the distant sea and the long channels of water in which red and blue boats rested, but something about the dead grey sky that had hung over the village of Marshton all day, and some quality in that bitterly cold, tireless wind, filled her with a nameless fear. She had kept the feeling under control during the early part of the day, for usually she was a reasonably well-balanced person, not given to premonitions or needless uneasiness, but now, alone in the solid brick and flint Vicarage on its slight eminence above the red-roofed village, she was suddenly forced to abandon all pretence of work and to wander restlessly about the darkening house.
   It was not much more than six o’clock on a day early in March, but already all colour had gone from the scene that lay before her as she stood at the landing window. Even the bright pantiles of the roofs below had almost merged into the greyness. She could see the white strip of the coast road snaking along beside the marsh, straddled by the small, familiar village, and in the distance the great mill at Blane-next-the-Sea was black against the sky. The wind shook the pane as she stood there and the empty house was filled with its long scream.
   Mrs. Sainty, the cook-housekeeper, had gone into Norwich in the early afternoon, as she generally did on her half-day, and would probably not be back till late, but Richard should have returned some time ago. He had only gone to make two or three calls on sick parishioners, calls that she had begged him not to make at all, for he had a bad cold and should not be out in the bitter wind.
   Standing there on the shadowy landing, slim and tall against the heavy sky, Emily Varney was conscious of the aching need for her husband that filled her sometimes, a need that was not always satisfied when he was with her. It was a need that would have amazed the villagers could they have known about it, for the popular opinion was that Mrs. Varney was rather hard; altogether too smart and good-looking for a parson’s wife.
   But the truth was that Emily Varney loved her husband passionately, as passionately as she had ever done at their marriage two years before. [. . . ]Emily was twenty-eight then, highly successful and very nearly beautiful. Richard Varney was ten years older, a bachelor, and it was said of him that at some time he had had an unfortunate love affair, which had left him a trifle soured. Emily had not thought him soured at all; then his slight remoteness had been an added attrac­tion, and they had much in common in their shared love of books, music and the Norfolk countryside.
   They had married and soon afterwards had come to live at Marshton, and somehow Emily had kept the secret of her success from the villagers, feeling, quite rightly, that they would not think it suitable that the Vicar’s wife should be the well-known writer of somewhat scholarly detective fiction. Her books were published under the name of A. E. Sebastian and, until recently, no one at all had even realized that there was a secret.