Mr. Treves’s death appears at first to be a sudden, natural consequence of his precarious heart condition. Its circumstances become more troubling when Thomas Royde connects the death to a staircase and the report that the lift was out of order—an explanation the hotel staff contradict. The incident turns a death reported at Gull’s Point into an unresolved puzzle at the Balmoral Court, where a discarded placard complicates the simplest account of what happened.

The news at Gull’s Point

When Mary Aldin returned to Gull’s Point, Hurstall told her that Lady Tressilian was distressed and wanted to see her. Mary found Lady Tressilian white and shaken. She told Mary that Mr. Treves was dead, apparently having collapsed soon after returning home the previous night. Lady Tressilian also believed he had not even undressed before he died. The death reaches the reader through this report: the scene of Mr. Treves’s collapse is not shown, and its immediate circumstances are initially known only through what others say.

Mary carried the news downstairs to the drawing-room, where Nevile Strange called Mr. Treves a poor old boy and asked what had happened. Mary relayed the apparent explanation: heart trouble, with Mr. Treves collapsing soon after he got in. Her announcement makes the death seem both sudden and comprehensible. Yet Royde’s recollection adds a circumstance that does not fit comfortably into that first account.

Royde’s account of the stairs

Royde wondered whether the stairs had contributed to Mr. Treves’s death. He explained that he and Ted Latimer had left Mr. Treves the previous evening just as he was starting up, and that they had advised him to take it slowly. Mary was surprised that he had not taken the lift. Royde answered that the lift had been out of order.

That detail gave the apparent heart attack a possible immediate trigger. At the Balmoral Court, Dr. Lazenby said Mr. Treves’s prescriptions showed that his health had been precarious. He explained that deaths in such heart cases were often sudden and agreed that the small added strain of climbing stairs might have been enough to cause the collapse. He qualified the explanation, however: it would apply if Mr. Treves had walked up the three flights, and he questioned whether Mr. Treves would have done so.

Mrs. Rogers, the hotel’s proprietress, supplied a reason for that doubt. Mr. Treves, she said, was careful of himself and always used the lift; she had considered that he received every care the hotel could provide. Her account makes Royde’s observation important in a different way. The issue is not simply whether stairs could have strained Mr. Treves’s heart, but why he would have been climbing them at all.

The contradictory notice

Mary pointed out that the lift had been out of order the previous night. Mrs. Rogers stared at her in surprise and insisted that it had not been. Royde then confirmed that he had come home with Mr. Treves and had seen an out-of-order placard on the lift. His recollection independently supports the detail that shaped Mary’s explanation, but it does not settle who put the notice there or why.

Mrs. Rogers went to check with Joe, the porter. Joe was emphatic that nothing had been wrong with the lift the previous night. There was, he confirmed, a placard like the one Royde described—but it had been tucked away under the desk and had not been used for over a year. The contradiction is therefore precise: Royde remembers seeing a real hotel notice, while the porter says the lift was functioning and that the notice had long been put aside.

The people present looked at one another and agreed that the matter was mysterious. Dr. Lazenby suggested that one of the hotel visitors might have played a practical joke; the group left the question there. The placard’s presence and history are established, but the explanation for its appearance is not. Nor does the conversation establish that anyone deliberately caused Mr. Treves’s death.

An unresolved death

The episode moves from bereavement to inquiry without resolving the discrepancy. Lady Tressilian and the drawing-room hear a plausible account of a sudden heart attack; Royde introduces the stairs; the doctor confirms that exertion could have been decisive for a man in Mr. Treves’s condition. But the hotel’s evidence removes the supposed necessity for him to climb: according to Mrs. Rogers and Joe, the lift was working.

That gap gives the death its narrative significance. The question is not whether Mr. Treves had a weak heart—the doctor’s examination of his prescriptions supports that—but whether the reported obstruction to the lift was genuine. A discarded notice, remembered by Royde in use and recognized by Joe as real but long unused, leaves the event open to suspicion without proving foul play. The group’s practical-joke suggestion closes the conversation, not the mystery.