'Mr. Manderson had rung the bell for you, I suppose. Yes? And what passed when you answered it?'

'Mr. Manderson had put out the decanter of whisky and a syphon and glass, sir, from the cupboard where he kept them—'

Trent held up his hand. 'While we are on that point, Martin, I want to ask you plainly, did Mr. Manderson drink very much? You understand this is not impertinent curiosity on my part. I want you to tell me, because it may possibly help in the clearing up of this case.'

'Perfectly, sir,' replied Martin gravely. 'I have no hesitation in telling you what I have already told the inspector. Mr. Manderson was, considering his position in life, a remarkably abstemious man. In my four years of service with him I never knew anything of an alcoholic nature pass his lips, except a glass or two of wine at dinner, very rarely a little at luncheon, and from time to time a whisky and soda before going to bed. He never seemed to form a habit of it. Often I used to find his glass in the morning with only a little soda water in it; sometimes he would have been having whisky with it, but never much. He never was particular about his drinks; ordinary soda was what he preferred, though I had ventured to suggest some of the natural minerals, having personally acquired a taste for them in my previous service. He used to keep them in the cupboard here, because he had a great dislike of being waited on more than was necessary. It was an understood thing that I never came near him after dinner unless sent for. And when he sent for anything, he liked it brought quick, and to be left alone again at once. He hated to be asked if he required anything more. Amazingly simple in his tastes, sir, Mr. Manderson was.'

'Very well; and he rang for you that night about a quarter past eleven. Now can you remember exactly what he said?'

'I think I can tell you with some approach to accuracy, sir. It was not much. First he asked me if Mr. Bunner had gone to bed, and I replied that he had been gone up some time. He then said that he wanted some one to sit up until 12.30, in case an important message should come by telephone, and that Mr. Marlowe having gone to Southampton for him in the motor, he wished me to do this, and that I was to take down the message if it came, and not disturb him. He also ordered a fresh syphon of soda water. I believe that was all, sir.'

'You noticed nothing unusual about him, I suppose?'

'No, sir, nothing unusual. When I answered the ring, he was seated at the desk listening at the telephone, waiting for a number, as I supposed. He gave his orders and went on listening at the same time. 'When I returned with the syphon he was engaged in conversation over the wire.'

'Do you remember anything of what he was saying?'

'Very little, sir; it was something about somebody being at some hotel—of no interest to me. I was only in the room just time enough to place the syphon on the table and withdraw. As I closed the door he was saying, "You're sure he isn't in the hotel?" or words to that effect.'

'And that was the last you saw and heard of him alive?'

'No, sir. A little later, at half-past eleven, when I had settled down in my pantry with the door ajar, and a book to pass the time, I heard Mr. Manderson go upstairs to bed. I immediately went to close the library window, and slipped the lock of the front door. I did not hear anything more.'

Trent considered. 'I suppose you didn't doze at all,' he said tentatively, 'while you were sitting up waiting for the telephone message?'

'Oh no, sir. I am always very wakeful about that time. I'm a bad sleeper, especially in the neighbourhood of the sea, and I generally read in bed until somewhere about midnight.'



'And did any message come?'

'No, sir.'

'No. And I suppose you sleep with your window open, these warm nights?'

'It is never closed at night, sir.'

Trent added a last note; then he looked thoughtfully through those he had taken. He rose and paced up and down the room for some moments with a downcast eye. At length he paused opposite Martin.

'It all seems perfectly ordinary and simple,' he said. 'I just want to get a few details clear. You went to shut the windows in the library before going to bed. Which windows?'

'The French window, sir. It had been open all day. The windows opposite the door were seldom opened.'

'And what about the curtains? I am wondering whether any one outside the house could have seen into the room.'

'Easily, sir, I should say, if he had got into the grounds on that side. The curtains were never drawn in the hot weather. Mr. Manderson would often sit right in the doorway at nights, smoking and looking out into the darkness. But nobody could have seen him who had any business to be there.'

'I see. And now tell me this. Your hearing is very acute, you say, and you heard Mr. Manderson enter the house when he came in after dinner from the garden. Did you hear him re-enter it after returning from the motor drive?'

Martin paused. 'Now you mention it, sir, I remember that I did not. His ringing the bell in this room was the first I knew of his being back. I should have heard him come in, if he had come in by the front. I should have heard the door go. But he must have come in by the window.' The man reflected for a moment, then added, 'As a general rule, Mr. Manderson would come in by the front, hang up his hat and coat in the hall, and pass down the hall into the study. It seems likely to me that he was in a great hurry to use the telephone, and so went straight across the lawn to the window he was like that, sir, when there was anything important to be done. He had his hat on, now I remember, and had thrown his greatcoat over the end of the table. He gave his order very sharp, too, as he always did when busy. A very precipitate man indeed was Mr. Manderson; a hustler, as they say.'

'Ah! he appeared to be busy. But didn't you say just now that you noticed nothing unusual about him?'

A melancholy smile flitted momentarily over Martin's face. 'That observation shows that you did not know Mr. Manderson, sir, if you will pardon my saying so. His being like that was nothing unusual; quite the contrary. It took me long enough to get used to it. Either he would be sitting quite still and smoking a cigar, thinking or reading, or else he would be writing, dictating, and sending off wires all at the same time, till it almost made one dizzy to see it, sometimes for an hour or more at a stretch. As for being in a hurry over a telephone message, I may say it wasn't in him to be anything else.'

Trent turned to the inspector, who met his eye with a look of answering intelligence. Not sorry to show his understanding of the line of inquiry opened by Trent, Mr. Murch for the first time put a question.

'Then you left him telephoning by the open window, with the lights on, and the drinks on the table; is that it?' 'That is so, Mr. Murch.' The delicacy of the change in Martin's manner when called upon to answer the detective momentarily distracted Trent's appreciative mind. But the big man's next question brought it back to the problem at once.

'About those drinks. You say Mr. Manderson often took no whisky before going to bed. Did he have any that night?'

'I could not say. The room was put to rights in the morning by one of the maids, and the glass washed, I presume, as usual. I know that the decanter was nearly full that evening. I had refilled it a few days before, and I glanced at it when I brought the fresh syphon, just out of habit, to make sure there was a decent-looking amount.'

The inspector went to the tall corner-cupboard and opened it. He took out a decanter of cut glass and set it on the table before Martin. 'Was it fuller than that?' he asked quietly. 'That's how I found it this morning.' The decanter was more than half empty.

For the first time Martin's self-possession wavered. He took up the decanter quickly, tilted it before his eyes, and then stared amazedly at the others. He said slowly: 'There's not much short of half a bottle gone out of this since I last set eyes on it—and that was that Sunday night.'

'Nobody in the house, I suppose?' suggested Trent discreetly. 'Out of the question!' replied Martin briefly; then he added, 'I beg pardon, sir, but this is a most extraordinary thing to me. Such a thing never happened in all my experience of Mr. Manderson. As for the women-servants, they never touch anything, I can answer for it; and as for me, when I want a drink I can help myself without going to the decanters.' He took up the decanter again and aimlessly renewed his observation of the contents, while the inspector eyed him with a look of serene satisfaction, as a master contemplates his handiwork.

Trent turned to a fresh page of his notebook, and tapped it thoughtfully with his pencil. Then he looked up and said, 'I suppose Mr. Manderson had dressed for dinner that night?'

'Certainly, sir. He had on a suit with a dress-jacket, what he used to refer to as a Tuxedo, which he usually wore when dining at home.'

'And he was dressed like that when you saw him last?'

'All but the jacket, sir. When he spent the evening in the library, as usually happened, he would change it for an old shooting-jacket after dinner, a light-coloured tweed, a little too loud in pattern for English tastes, perhaps. He had it on when I saw him last. It used to hang in this cupboard here'—Martin opened the door of it as he spoke—along with Mr. Manderson's fishing-rods and such things, so that he could slip it on after dinner without going upstairs.'

'Leaving the dinner-jacket in the cupboard?'

'Yes, sir. The housemaid used to take it upstairs in the morning.'

'In the morning,' Trent repeated slowly. 'And now that we are speaking of the morning, will you tell me exactly what you know about that? I understand that Mr. Manderson was not missed until the body was found about ten o'clock.'

'That is so, sir. Mr. Manderson would never be called, or have anything brought to him in the morning. He occupied a separate bedroom. Usually he would get up about eight and go round to the bathroom, and he would come down some time before nine. But often he would sleep till nine or ten o'clock. Mrs. Manderson was always called at seven. The maid would take in tea to her. Yesterday morning Mrs. Manderson took breakfast about eight in her sitting-room as usual, and every one supposed that Mr. Manderson was still in bed and asleep, when Evans came rushing up to the house with the shocking intelligence.'

'I see,' said Trent. 'And now another thing. You say you slipped the lock of the front door before going to bed. Was that all the locking-up you did?'

'To the front door, sir, yes; I slipped the lock. No more is considered necessary in these parts. But I had locked both the doors at the back, and seen to the fastenings of all the windows on the ground floor. In the morning everything was as I had left it.'

'As you had left it. Now here is another point—the last, I think. Were the clothes in which the body was found the clothes that Mr. Manderson would naturally have worn that day?'

Martin rubbed his chin. 'You remind me how surprised I was when I first set eyes on the body, sir. At first I couldn't make out what was unusual about the clothes, and then I saw what it was. The collar was a shape of collar Mr. Manderson never wore except with evening dress. Then I found that he had put on all the same things that he had worn the night before—large fronted shirt and all—except just the coat and waistcoat and trousers, and the brown shoes, and blue tie. As for the suit, it was one of half a dozen he might have worn. But for him to have simply put on all the rest just because they were there, instead of getting out the kind of shirt and things he always wore by day; well, sir, it was unprecedented. It shows, like some other things, what a hurry he must have been in when getting up.'

'Of course,' said Trent. 'Well, I think that's all I wanted to know. You have put everything with admirable clearness, Martin. If we want to ask any more questions later on, I suppose you will be somewhere about.'

'I shall be at your disposal, sir.' Martin bowed, and went out quietly.

Trent flung himself into the armchair and exhaled a long breath. 'Martin is a great creature,' he said. 'He is far, far better than a play. There is none like him, none, nor will be when our summers have deceased. Straight, too; not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man.'

'I never said a word about suspecting him.' The inspector was taken aback. 'You know, Mr. Trent, he would never have told his story like that if he thought I suspected him.'

'I dare say he doesn't think so. He is a wonderful creature, a great artist; but, in spite of that, he is not at all a sensitive type. It has never occurred to his mind that you, Murch, could suspect him, Martin, the complete, the accomplished. But I know it. You must understand, inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of officers of the law. It is a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the time I was questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: "It is my duty to tell you that anything you now say will be taken down and used in evidence against you." Your manner would have deceived most men, but it could not deceive me.'

Mr. Murch laughed heartily. Trent's nonsense never made any sort of impression on his mind, but he took it as a mark of esteem, which indeed it was; so it never failed to please him. 'Well, Mr. Trent,' he said, 'you're perfectly right. There's no point in denying it, I have got my eye on him. Not that there's anything definite; but you know as well as I do how often servants are mixed up in affairs of this kind, and this man is such a very quiet customer. You remember the case of Lord William Russell's valet, who went in as usual, in the morning, to draw up the blinds in his master's bedroom, as quiet and starchy as you please, a few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. I've talked to all the women of the house, and I don't believe there's a morsel of harm in one of them. But Martin's not so easy set aside. I don't like his manner; I believe he's hiding something. If so, I shall find it out.'

'Cease!' said Trent. 'Drain not to its dregs the urn of bitter prophecy. Let us get back to facts. Have you, as a matter of evidence, anything at all to bring against Martin's story as he has told it to us?'

'Nothing whatever at present. As for his suggestion that Manderson came in by way of the window after leaving Marlowe and the car, that's right enough, I should say. I questioned the servant who swept the room next morning, and she tells me there were gravelly marks near the window, on this plain drugget that goes round the carpet. And there's a footprint in this soft new gravel just outside.' The inspector took a folding rule from his pocket and with it pointed out the traces. 'One of the patent shoes Manderson was wearing that night exactly fits that print; you'll find them,' he added, 'on the top shelf in the bedroom, near the window end, the only patents in the row. The girl who polished them in the morning picked them out for me.'

Trent bent down and studied the faint marks keenly. 'Good!' he said. 'You have covered a lot of ground, Murch, I must say. That was excellent about the whisky; you made your point finely. I felt inclined to shout "Encore!" It's a thing that I shall have to think over.'

'I thought you might have fitted it in already,' said Mr. Murch. 'Come, Mr. Trent, we're only at the beginning of our enquiries, but what do you say to this for a preliminary theory? There's a plan of burglary, say a couple of men in it and Martin squared. They know where the plate is, and all about the handy little bits of stuff in the drawing-room and elsewhere. They watch the house; see Manderson off to bed; Martin comes to shut the window, and leaves it ajar, accidentally on purpose. They wait till Martin goes to bed at twelve-thirty; then they just walk into the library, and begin to sample the whisky first thing. Now suppose Manderson isn't asleep, and suppose they make a noise opening the window, or however it might be. He hears it; thinks of burglars; gets up very quietly to see if anything's wrong; creeps down on them, perhaps, just as they're getting ready for work. They cut and run; he chases them down to the shed, and collars one; there's a fight; one of them loses his temper and his head, and makes a swinging job of it. Now, Mr. Trent, pick that to pieces.'

'Very well,' said Trent; 'just to oblige you, Murch, especially as I know you don't believe a word of it. First: no traces of any kind left by your burglar or burglars, and the window found fastened in the morning, according to Martin. Not much force in that, I allow. Next: nobody in the house hears anything of this stampede through the library, nor hears any shout from Manderson either inside the house or outside. Next: Manderson goes down without a word to anybody, though Bunner and Martin are both at hand. Next: did you ever hear, in your long experience, of a householder getting up in the night to pounce on burglars, who dressed himself fully, with underclothing, shirt; collar and tie, trousers, waistcoat and coat, socks and hard leather shoes; and who gave the finishing touches to a somewhat dandified toilet by doing his hair, and putting on his watch and chain? Personally, I call that over-dressing the part. The only decorative detail he seems to have forgotten is his teeth.'

The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before him. 'No,' he said at last. 'Of course there's no help in that theory. I rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man gets up before the servants are awake, dresses himself awry, and is murdered within sight of his house early enough to be 'cold and stiff by ten in the morning.'

Trent shook his head. 'We can't build anything on that last consideration. I've gone into the subject with people who know. I shouldn't wonder,' he added, 'if the traditional notions about loss of temperature and rigour after death had occasionally brought an innocent man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure; most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock will make an ass of himself at the inquest, is almost as certain as that tomorrow's sun will rise. I've seen him. He will say the body must have been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and rigor mortis. I can see him nosing it all out in some textbook that was out of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell you some facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your professional career. There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or labouring under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically instantaneously; there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't hang anybody on rigor mortis nowadays, inspector, much as you may resent the limitation. No, what we can say is this. If he had been shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its business, it would have been heard, and very likely seen too. In fact, we must reason, to begin with, at any rate, on the assumption that he wasn't shot at a time when people might be awake; it isn't done in these parts. Put that time at 6.30 a.m. Manderson went up to bed at 11 p.m., and Martin sat up till 12.30. Assuming that he went to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us something like six hours for the crime to be committed in; and that is a long time. But whenever it took place, I wish you would suggest a reason why Manderson, who was a fairly late riser, was up and dressed at or before 6.30; and why neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor Bunner, nor his wife heard him moving about, or letting himself out of the house. He must have been careful. He must have crept about like a cat. Do you feel as I do, Murch, about all this; that it is very, very strange and baffling?' 'That's how it looks,' agreed the inspector.

'And now,' said Trent, rising to his feet, 'I'll leave you to your meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation of all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up there. But,' concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round in the doorway, 'if you can tell me at any time, how under the sun a man who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an incipient dement.'



CHAPTER V: Poking About

There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him?—not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of achievement. A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was going to appear.

The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by a tall end window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened. Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing half-way to the upper floor. As Trent passed it he glanced within. A little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very audible creaks marked his passage.

He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key. Then he turned to the room.

It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead, and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed, too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing-table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make. Trent looked them over with a questing eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence.

The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams, were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.

Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities, opened two tall cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.

In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall. No boots were among them. Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather, now turned to these, and glanced over the collection with an appreciative eye. It was to be seen that Manderson had been inclined to pride himself on a rather small and well-formed foot. The shoes were of a distinctive shape, narrow and round-toed, beautifully made; all were evidently from the same last.

Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather shoes on the upper shelf.

These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death. They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing what he saw with the appearance of the neighbouring shoes. Then he took them up and examined the line of junction of the uppers with the soles.

As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present, would have recognized.

Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing excitement. The inspector had noted that when Trent had picked up a strong scent he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though the inspector could not have told you that it was in fact the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worter in A Major.

He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape, and looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the heel and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.

Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the Englishman's expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the shoes there.

This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again, and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing-table now engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the empty chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude, staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the inner door leading to Mrs Manderson's room.

It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put down from its place as the lady's bower. All the array of objects that belong to a woman's dressing-table had been removed; on bed and chairs and smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no trace remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils, handkerchiefs and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The room was like an unoccupied guest-chamber. Yet in every detail of furniture and decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting taste. Trent, as his expert eye noted the various perfection of colour and form amid which the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought her loneliest thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an artistic nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew stronger; and his brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens laid upon it, and of the deed of which the history was now shaping itself with more and more of substance before his busy mind.

He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with an iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow flower-bed, and stretched away, with an abrupt dip at the farther end, toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the garden-entrance of the library. In the farther inside corner of the room was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the maid was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.

Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of the room and its neighbour. The bed stood in the angle between the communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall dividing the room from Manderson's. Trent stared at the pillows; then he lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open door into the adjoining room.

This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon that furthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of copper connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it thoughtfully, then at the switches connected with the other lights in the room. They were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and some way out of his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied himself that the lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel, walked quickly into Manderson's room, and rang the bell.

'I want your help again, Martin,' he said, as the butler presented himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. 'I want you to prevail upon Mrs Manderson's maid to grant me an interview.'

'Certainly, sir,' said Martin.

'What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?'

'She's French, sir,' replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause: 'She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for her—since you ask me.'

'You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?' said Trent. 'Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her.'

'I will send her up immediately, sir.' The butler withdrew, and Trent wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than he had expected, a small neat figure in black appeared quietly before him.

The lady's maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favourable notice of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been hoping desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was as great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing, she felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner. Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman, and at a distance he had appeared sympathique.

As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candour, then, that she said, 'Monsieur desire to speak with me.' She added helpfully, 'I am called Celestine.'

'Naturally,' said Trent with businesslike calm. 'Now what I want you to tell me, Celestine, is this. When you took tea to your mistress yesterday morning at seven o'clock, was the door between the two bedrooms—this door here—open?'

Celestine became intensely animated in an instant. 'Oh yes!' she said, using her favourite English idiom. 'The door was open as always, monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain. Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in there—ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other room, all explains itself.' She tripped across to the door, and urged Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. 'See! I enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I come quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand—open always—so! But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of Monsieur Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach from down there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order. Yesterday it was as ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame sleep like an angel—she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the plateau—I open the curtains—I prepare the toilette—I retire—voila!' Celestine paused for breath and spread her hands abroad.

Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening gravity, nodded his head. 'I see exactly how it was now,' he said. 'Thank you, Celestine. So Mr Manderson was supposed to be still in his room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having breakfast in her boudoir?'

'Oui, monsieur.'

'Nobody missed him, in fact,' remarked Trent. 'Well, Celestine, I am very much obliged to you.' He reopened the door to the outer bedroom.

'It is nothing, monsieur,' said Celestine, as she crossed the small room. 'I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur Manderson. But I not regret him too much,' she added with sudden and amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the colour rose in her small dark face. English departed from her. 'Je ne le regrette pas du tout, du tout!' she cried with a flood of words. 'Madame—ah! je me jetterais au leu pour madame—une femme si charmante, si adorable! Mais un homme comme monsieur—maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!—de ma vie! J'en avais par-dessus la tete, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce insupportable, tout de meme, qu'il existe des types comme ca? Je vous jure que—'

'Finissez ce chahut, Celestine!' Trent broke in sharply. Celestine's tirade had brought back the memory of his student days with a rush. 'En voila une scene! C'est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentret ca, mademoiselle. Du reste, c'est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! Have some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don't wave your fists about so much; you might hit something. You seem,' he went on more pleasantly, as Celestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, 'to be even more glad than other people that Mr Manderson is out of the way. I could almost suspect, Celestine, that Mr Manderson did not take as much notice of you as you thought necessary and right.'

'A peine s'il m'avait regarde!' Celestine answered simply.

'Ca, c'est un comble!' observed Trent. 'You are a nice young woman for a small tea-party, I don't think. A star upon your birthday burned, whose fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven, Celestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a beauty!'

Celestine took this as a scarcely expected compliment. The surprise restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at Trent over her shoulder, the lady's maid opened the door and swiftly disappeared.

Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two forcible descriptive terms in Celestine's language, and turned to his problem. He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and placed them on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself on the other opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat with eyes fixed upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled, almost inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill. But the man in the room, his face grown hard and sombre now with his thoughts, never moved.

So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out upon the landing.

Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid's hand had failed to give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the dressing-table and on the mantelshelf—pipes, penknives, pencils, keys, golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins, and bottles. Two fine etchings and some water-colour sketches hung on the walls; leaning against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings. A row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window. Trent crossed the room and studied them intently; then he measured some of them with his tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the side of the bed, and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.

The photographs on the mantelshelf attracted him presently. He rose and examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two others were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print of three youths—one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue eyes—clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century. Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his attention to a flat leathern case that lay by the cigarette-box.

It opened easily. A small and light revolver, of beautiful workmanship, was disclosed, with a score or so of loose cartridges. On the stock were engraved the initials 'J. M.'

A step was heard on the stairs, and as Trent opened the breech and peered into the barrel of the weapon, Inspector Murch appeared at the open door of the room. 'I was wondering—' he began; then stopped as he saw what the other was about. His intelligent eyes opened slightly. 'Whose is the revolver, Mr Trent?' he asked in a conversational tone.

'Evidently it belongs to the occupant of the room, Mr Marlowe,' replied Trent with similar lightness, pointing to the initials. 'I found this lying about on the mantelpiece. It seems a handy little pistol to me, and it has been very carefully cleaned, I should say, since the last time it was used. But I know little about firearms.'

'Well, I know a good deal,' rejoined the inspector quietly, taking the revolver from Trent's outstretched hand. 'It's a bit of a speciality with me, is firearms, as I think you know, Mr Trent. But it don't require an expert to tell one thing.' He replaced the revolver in its case on the mantel-shelf, took out one of the cartridges, and laid it on the spacious palm of one hand; then, taking a small object from his waistcoat pocket, he laid it beside the cartridge. It was a little leaden bullet, slightly battered about the nose, and having upon it some bright new scratches.

'Is that the one?' Trent murmured as he bent over the inspector's hand.

'That's him,' replied Mr Murch. 'Lodged in the bone at the back of the skull. Dr Stock got it out within the last hour, and handed it to the local officer, who has just sent it on to me. These bright scratches you see were made by the doctor's instruments. These other marks were made by the rifling of the barrel a barrel like this one.' He tapped the revolver. 'Same make, same calibre. There is no other that marks the bullet just like this.'

With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak. 'This mystery is all wrong,' he observed. 'It is insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night, many hours after the murder was committed.'

'There is no doubt whatever about all that,' said Mr Murch, with a slight emphasis on the verb.

'And now,' pursued Trent, 'we are invited by this polished and insinuating firearm to believe the following line of propositions: that Marlowe never went to Southampton; that he returned to the house in the night; that he somehow, without waking Mrs Manderson or anybody else, got Manderson to get up, dress himself, and go out into the grounds; that he then and there shot the said Manderson with his incriminating pistol; that he carefully cleaned the said pistol, returned to the house and, again without disturbing any one, replaced it in its case in a favourable position to be found by the officers of the law; that he then withdrew and spent the rest of the day in hiding—with a large motor car; and that he turned up, feigning ignorance of the whole affair, at—what time was it?'

'A little after 9 p.m.' The inspector still stared moodily at Trent. 'As you say, Mr Trent, that is the first theory suggested by this find, and it seems wild enough—at least it would do if it didn't fall to pieces at the very start. When the murder was done Marlowe must have been fifty to a hundred miles away. He did go to Southampton.'

'How do you know?'

'I questioned him last night, and took down his story. He arrived in Southampton about 6.30 on the Monday morning.'

'Come off' exclaimed Trent bitterly. 'What do I care about his story? What do you care about his story? I want to know how you know he went to Southampton.'

Mr Murch chuckled. 'I thought I should take a rise out of you, Mr Trent,' he said. 'Well, there's no harm in telling you. After I arrived yesterday evening, as soon as I had got the outlines of the story from Mrs Manderson and the servants, the first thing I did was to go to the telegraph office and wire to our people in Southampton. Manderson had told his wife when he went to bed that he had changed his mind, and sent Marlowe to Southampton to get some important information from some one who was crossing by the next day's boat. It seemed right enough, but, you see, Marlowe was the only one of the household who wasn't under my hand, so to speak. He didn't return in the car until later in the evening; so before thinking the matter out any further, I wired to Southampton making certain enquiries. Early this morning I got this reply.' He handed a series of telegraph slips to Trent, who read:

PERSON ANSWERING DESCRIPTION IN MOTOR ANSWERING DESCRIPTION ARRIVED BEDFORD HOTEL HERE 6.30 THIS MORNING GAVE NAME MARLOWE LEFT CAR HOTEL GARAGE TOLD ATTENDANT CAR BELONGED MANDERSON HAD BATH AND BREAKFAST WENT OUT HEARD OF LATER AT DOCKS ENQUIRING FOR PASSENGER NAME HARRIS ON HAVRE BOAT ENQUIRED REPEATEDLY UNTIL BOAT LEFT AT NOON NEXT HEARD OF AT HOTEL WHERE HE LUNCHED ABOUT 1.15 LEFT SOON AFTERWARDS IN CAR COMPANY'S AGENTS INFORM BERTH WAS BOOKED NAME HARRIS LAST WEEK BUT HARRIS DID NOT TRAVEL BY BOAT BURKE INSPECTOR.

'Simple and satisfactory,' observed Mr Murch as Trent, after twice reading the message, returned it to him. 'His own story corroborated in every particular. He told me he hung about the dock for half an hour or so on the chance of Harris turning up late, then strolled back, lunched, and decided to return at once. He sent a wire to Manderson—"Harris not turned up missed boat returning Marlowe," which was duly delivered here in the afternoon, and placed among the dead man's letters. He motored back at a good rate, and arrived dog-tired. When he heard of Manderson's death from Martin, he nearly fainted. What with that and the being without sleep for so long, he was rather a wreck when I came to interview him last night; but he was perfectly coherent.'

Trent picked up the revolver and twirled the cylinder idly for a few moments. 'It was unlucky for Manderson that Marlowe left his pistol and cartridges about so carelessly,' he remarked at length, as he put it back in the case. 'It was throwing temptation in somebody's way, don't you think?'

Mr Murch shook his head. 'There isn't really much to lay hold of about the revolver, when you come to think. That particular make of revolver is common enough in England. It was introduced from the States. Half the people who buy a revolver today for self-defence or mischief provide themselves with that make, of that calibre. It is very reliable, and easily carried in the hip-pocket. There must be thousands of them in the possession of crooks and honest men. For instance,' continued the inspector with an air of unconcern, 'Manderson himself had one, the double of this. I found it in one of the top drawers of the desk downstairs, and it's in my overcoat pocket now.'

'Aha! so you were going to keep that little detail to yourself.'

'I was,' said the inspector; 'but as you've found one revolver, you may as well know about the other. As I say, neither of them may do us any good. The people in the house—'

Both men started, and the inspector checked his speech abruptly, as the half-closed door of the bedroom was slowly pushed open, and a man stood in the doorway. His eyes turned from the pistol in its open case to the faces of Trent and the inspector. They, who had not heard a sound to herald this entrance, simultaneously looked at his long, narrow feet. He wore rubber-soled tennis shoes.

'You must be Mr Bunner,' said Trent.



CHAPTER VI: Mr Bunner on the Case

'Calvin C. Bunner, at your service,' amended the newcomer, with a touch of punctilio, as he removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He was used to finding Englishmen slow and ceremonious with strangers, and Trent's quick remark plainly disconcerted him a little. 'You are Mr Trent, I expect,' he went on. 'Mrs Manderson was telling me a while ago. Captain, good-morning.' Mr Murch acknowledged the outlandish greeting with a nod. 'I was coming up to my room, and I heard a strange voice in here, so I thought I would take a look in.' Mr Bunner laughed easily. 'You thought I might have been eavesdropping, perhaps,' he said. 'No, sir; I heard a word or two about a pistol—this one, I guess—and that's all.'

Mr Bunner was a thin, rather short young man with a shaven, pale, bony, almost girlish face, and large, dark, intelligent eyes. His waving dark hair was parted in the middle. His lips, usually occupied with a cigar, in its absence were always half open with a curious expression as of permanent eagerness. By smoking or chewing a cigar this expression was banished, and Mr Bunner then looked the consummately cool and sagacious Yankee that he was.

Born in Connecticut, he had gone into a broker's office on leaving college, and had attracted the notice of Manderson, whose business with his firm he had often handled. The Colossus had watched him for some time, and at length offered him the post of private secretary. Mr Bunner was a pattern business man, trustworthy, long-headed, methodical, and accurate. Manderson could have found many men with those virtues; but he engaged Mr Bunner because he was also swift and secret, and had besides a singular natural instinct in regard to the movements of the stock market.

Trent and the American measured one another coolly with their eyes. Both appeared satisfied with what they saw. 'I was having it explained to me,' said Trent pleasantly, 'that my discovery of a pistol that might have shot Manderson does not amount to very much. I am told it is a favourite weapon among your people, and has become quite popular over here.'

Mr Bunner stretched out a bony hand and took the pistol from its case. 'Yes, sir,' he said, handling it with an air of familiarity; 'the captain is right. This is what we call out home a Little Arthur, and I dare say there are duplicates of it in a hundred thousand hip-pockets this minute. I consider it too light in the hand myself,' Mr Bunner went on, mechanically feeling under the tail of his jacket, and producing an ugly looking weapon. 'Feel of that, now, Mr Trent—it's loaded, by the way. Now this Little Arthur—Marlowe bought it just before we came over this year to please the old man. Manderson said it was ridiculous for a man to be without a pistol in the twentieth century. So he went out and bought what they offered him, I guess—never consulted me. Not but what it's a good gun,' Mr Bunner conceded, squinting along the sights. 'Marlowe was poor with it at first, but I've coached him some in the last month or so, and he's practised until he is pretty good. But he never could get the habit of carrying it around. Why, it's as natural to me as wearing my pants. I have carried one for some years now, because there was always likely to be somebody laying for Manderson. And now,' Mr Bunner concluded sadly, 'they got him when I wasn't around. Well, gentlemen, you must excuse me. I am going into Bishopsbridge. There is a lot to do these days, and I have to send off a bunch of cables big enough to choke a cow.'

'I must be off too,' said Trent. 'I have an appointment at the "Three Tuns" inn.'

Let me give you a lift in the automobile,' said Mr Bunner cordially. 'I go right by that joint. Say, cap., are you coming my way too? No? Then come along, Mr Trent, and help me get out the car. The chauffeur is out of action, and we have to do 'most everything ourselves except clean the dirt off her.'

Still tirelessly talking in his measured drawl, Mr Bunner led Trent downstairs and through the house to the garage at the back. It stood at a little distance from the house, and made a cool retreat from the blaze of the midday sun.

Mr Bunner seemed to be in no hurry to get out the car. He offered Trent a cigar, which was accepted, and for the first time lit his own. Then he seated himself on the footboard of the car, his thin hands clasped between his knees, and looked keenly at the other.

'See here, Mr Trent,' he said, after a few moments. 'There are some things I can tell you that may be useful to you. I know your record. You are a smart man, and I like dealing with smart men. I don't know if I have that detective sized up right, but he strikes me as a mutt. I would answer any questions he had the gumption to ask me—I have done so, in fact—but I don't feel encouraged to give him any notions of mine without his asking. See?'

Trent nodded. 'That is a feeling many people have in the presence of our police,' he said. 'It's the official manner, I suppose. But let me tell you, Murch is anything but what you think. He is one of the shrewdest officers in Europe. He is not very quick with his mind, but he is very sure. And his experience is immense. My forte is imagination, but I assure you in police work experience outweighs it by a great deal.'

'Outweigh nothing!' replied Mr Bunner crisply. 'This is no ordinary case, Mr Trent. I will tell you one reason why. I believe the old man knew there was something coming to him. Another thing: I believe it was something he thought he couldn't dodge.'

Trent pulled a crate opposite to Mr Bunner's place on the footboard and seated himself. 'This sounds like business,' he said. 'Tell me your ideas.'

'I say what I do because of the change in the old man's manner this last few weeks. I dare say you have heard, Mr Trent, that he was a man who always kept himself well in hand. That was so. I have always considered him the coolest and hardest head in business. That man's calm was just deadly—I never saw anything to beat it. And I knew Manderson as nobody else did. I was with him in the work he really lived for. I guess I knew him a heap better than his wife did, poor woman. I knew him better than Marlowe could—he never saw Manderson in his office when there was a big thing on. I knew him better than any of his friends.'

'Had he any friends?' interjected Trent.

Mr Bunner glanced at him sharply. 'Somebody has been putting you next, I see that,' he remarked. 'No: properly speaking, I should say not. He had many acquaintances among the big men, people he saw, most every day; they would even go yachting or hunting together. But I don't believe there ever was a man that Manderson opened a corner of his heart to. But what I was going to say was this. Some months ago the old man began to get like I never knew him before—gloomy and sullen, just as if he was everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that he couldn't fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down town as it was up home, he acted just as if there was something lying heavy on his mind. But it wasn't until a few weeks back that his self-restraint began to go; and let me tell you this, Mr Trent'—the American laid his bony claw on the other's knee—'I'm the only man that knows it. With every one else he would be just morose and dull; but when he was alone with me in his office, or anywhere where we would be working together, if the least little thing went wrong, by George! he would fly off the handle to beat the Dutch. In this library here I have seen him open a letter with something that didn't just suit him in it, and he would rip around and carry on like an Indian, saying he wished he had the man that wrote it here, he wouldn't do a thing to him, and so on, till it was just pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here's another thing. For a week before he died Manderson neglected his work, for the first time in my experience. He wouldn't answer a letter or a cable, though things looked like going all to pieces over there. I supposed that this anxiety of his, whatever it was, had got on to his nerves till they were worn out. Once I advised him to see a doctor, and he told me to go to hell. But nobody saw this side of him but me. If he was having one of these rages in the library here, for example, and Mrs Manderson would come into the room, he would be all calm and cold again in an instant.'

'And you put this down to some secret anxiety, a fear that somebody had designs on his life?' asked Trent.

The American nodded.

'I suppose,' Trent resumed, 'you had considered the idea of there being something wrong with his mind—a break-down from overstrain, say. That is the first thought that your account suggests to me. Besides, it is what is always happening to your big business men in America, isn't it? That is the impression one gets from the newspapers.'

'Don't let them slip you any of that bunk,' said Mr Bunner earnestly. 'It's only the ones who have got rich too quick, and can't make good, who go crazy. Think of all our really big men—the men anywhere near Manderson's size: did you ever hear of any one of them losing his senses? They don't do it—believe me. I know they say every man has his loco point,' Mr Bunner added reflectively, 'but that doesn't mean genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity in a man...like hating cats...or my own weakness of not being able to touch any kind of fish-food.'

'Well, what was Manderson's?'

'He was full of them—the old man. There was his objection to all the unnecessary fuss and luxury that wealthy people don't kick at much, as a general rule. He didn't have any use for expensive trifles and ornaments. He wouldn't have anybody do little things for him; he hated to have servants tag around after him unless he wanted them. And although Manderson was as careful about his clothes as any man I ever knew, and his shoes—well, sir, the amount of money he spent on shoes was sinful—in spite of that, I tell you, he never had a valet. He never liked to have anybody touch him. All his life nobody ever shaved him.'

'I've heard something of that,' Trent remarked. 'Why was it, do you think?'

'Well,' Mr Bunner answered slowly, 'it was the Manderson habit of mind, I guess; a sort of temper of general suspicion and jealousy.

They say his father and grandfather were just the same....Like a dog with a bone, you know, acting as if all the rest of creation was laying for a chance to steal it. He didn't really think the barber would start in to saw his head off; he just felt there was a possibility that he might, and he was taking no risks. Then again in business he was always convinced that somebody else was after his bone—which was true enough a good deal of the time; but not all the time. The consequence of that was that the old man was the most cautious and secret worker in the world of finance; and that had a lot to do with his success, too.... But that doesn't amount to being a lunatic, Mr Trent; not by a long way. You ask me if Manderson was losing his mind before he died. I say I believe he was just worn out with worrying over something, and was losing his nerve.'

Trent smoked thoughtfully. He wondered how much Mr Bunner knew of the domestic difficulty in his chief's household, and decided to put out a feeler. 'I understood that he had trouble with his wife.'

'Sure,' replied Mr Bunner. 'But do you suppose a thing like that was going to upset Sig Manderson that way? No, sir! He was a sight too big a man to be all broken up by any worry of that kind.'

Trent looked half-incredulously into the eyes of the young man. But behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence. Mr Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to be a minor source of trouble for a big man.

'What was the trouble between them, anyhow?' Trent enquired.

'You can search me,' Mr Bunner replied briefly. He puffed at his cigar. 'Marlowe and I have often talked about it, and we could never make out a solution. I had a notion at first,' said Mr Bunner in a lower voice, leaning forward, 'that the old man was disappointed and vexed because he had expected a child; but Marlowe told me that the disappointment on that score was the other way around, likely as not. His idea was all right, I guess; he gathered it from something said by Mrs Manderson's French maid.'

Trent looked up at him quickly. 'Celestine!' he said; and his thought was, 'So that was what she was getting at!'

Mr Bunner misunderstood his glance. 'Don't you think I'm giving a man away, Mr Trent,' he said. 'Marlowe isn't that kind. Celestine just took a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she would always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite unlike English that way. And servant or no servant,' added Mr Bunner with emphasis, 'I don't see how a woman could mention such a subject to a man. But the French beat me.' He shook his head slowly.

'But to come back to what you were telling me just now,' Trent said. 'You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark.'

'Terror—I don't know,' replied Mr Bunner meditatively. 'Anxiety, if you like. Or suspense—that's rather my idea of it. The old man was hard to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn't taking any precautions—he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was asking for a quick finish—supposing there's any truth in my idea. Why, he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark, with his white shirt just a target for anybody's gun. As for who should threaten his life well, sir,' said Mr Bunner with a faint smile, 'it's certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal hold-up alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms. Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr Trent. There's a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the Atlantic is going to stop them?... It takes some sand, I tell you, to be a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew—had always known—that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up and down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had somehow got to know that some of them were definitely after him at last. What licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself open to them the way he did—why he never tried to dodge, but walked right down into the garden yesterday morning to be shot at.'

Mr Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with wrinkled brows, faint blue vapours rising from their cigars. Then Trent rose. 'Your theory is quite fresh to me,' he said. 'It's perfectly rational, and it's only a question of whether it fits all the facts, I mustn't give away what I'm doing for my newspaper, Mr Bunner, but I will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I'm deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again.' He looked at his watch. 'I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make a move?'

'Two o'clock,' said Mr Bunner, consulting his own, as he got up from the foot-board. 'Ten a.m. in little old New York. You don't know Wall Street, Mr Trent. Let's you and I hope we never see anything nearer hell than what's loose in the Street this minute.'



CHAPTER VII: The Lady in Black

The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze; the sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this perfection of English weather Trent, who had slept ill, went down before eight o'clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast grey boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little way against a coast-wise current, and then returned to his refuge battered and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff again, and his mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the affair he had in hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.

It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place. He had carried matters not much further after parting with the American on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the inn into the town, accompanied by Mr Cupples, and had there made certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an enquiry at the telephone exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for the Record and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the paper's local representative. He had afterwards dined with Mr Cupples, and had spent the rest of the evening in meditative solitude on the veranda.

This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed in body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope, he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as it were, the day before.

The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea level, where the face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down, hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the movements of water—the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner, her face full of some dream.

This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face of southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with colour on the cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow. Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the perdition of too much length, which makes a conscientious mind ashamed that it cannot help, on occasion, admiring the tip-tilted. Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside her, and the lively breeze played with her thick dark hair, blowing backward the two broad bandeaux that should have covered much of her forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at her nape. Everything about this lady was black, from her shoes of suede to the hat that she had discarded; lustreless black covered her to her bare throat. All she wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as her looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure seated there, until one looked at her face and saw the glow and triumph of all vigorous beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea together in the prime of the year. One saw, too, a womanhood so unmixed and vigorous, so unconsciously sure of itself, as scarcely to be English, still less American.

Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision and active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was marvellous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held, was evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a picture was printed on his memory that would never pass away.

As he went by unheard on the turf the woman, still alone with her thoughts, suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning. This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to go forward, perhaps to enjoy.

So he saw her for an instant as he passed, and he did not turn. He knew suddenly who the woman must be, and it was as if a curtain of gloom were drawn between him and the splendour of the day.

During breakfast at the hotel Mr Cupples found Trent little inclined to talk. He excused himself on the plea of a restless night. Mr Cupples, on the other hand, was in a state of bird-like alertness. The prospect of the inquest seemed to enliven him. He entertained Trent with a disquisition upon the history of that most ancient and once busy tribunal, the coroner's court, and remarked upon the enviable freedom of its procedure from the shackles of rule and precedent. From this he passed to the case that was to come before it that morning.

'Young Bunner mentioned to me last night,' he said, 'when I went up there after dinner, the hypothesis which he puts forward in regard to the crime. A very remarkable young man, Trent. His meaning is occasionally obscure, but in my opinion he is gifted with a clearheaded knowledge of the world quite unusual in one of his apparent age. Indeed, his promotion by Manderson to the position of his principal lieutenant speaks for itself. He seems to have assumed with perfect confidence the control at this end of the wire, as he expresses it, of the complicated business situation caused by the death of his principal, and he has advised very wisely as to the steps I should take on Mabel's behalf, and the best course for her to pursue until effect has been given to the provisions of the will. I was accordingly less disposed than I might otherwise have been to regard his suggestion of an industrial vendetta as far-fetched. When I questioned him he was able to describe a number of cases in which attacks of one sort or another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it is in the United States.'

'I thought,' said Trent listlessly, 'that Puritanism was about as strong there as the money-getting craze.'

'Your remark,' answered Mr Cupples, with as near an approach to humour as was possible to him, 'is not in the nature of a testimonial to what you call Puritanism—a convenient rather than an accurate term; for I need not remind you that it was invented to describe an Anglican party which aimed at the purging of the services and ritual of their Church from certain elements repugnant to them. The sense of your observation, however, is none the less sound, and its truth is extremely well illustrated by the case of Manderson himself, who had, I believe, the virtues of purity, abstinence, and self-restraint in their strongest form. No, Trent, there are other and more worthy things among the moral constituents of which I spoke; and in our finite nature, the more we preoccupy ourselves with the bewildering complexity of external apparatus which science places in our hands, the less vigour have we left for the development of the holier purposes of humanity within us. Agricultural machinery has abolished the festival of the Harvest Home. Mechanical travel has abolished the inn, or all that was best in it. I need not multiply instances. The view I am expressing to you,' pursued Mr Cupples, placidly buttering a piece of toast, 'is regarded as fundamentally erroneous by many of those who think generally as I do about the deeper concerns of life, but I am nevertheless firmly persuaded of its truth.'

'It needs epigrammatic expression,' said Trent, rising from the table. 'If only it could be crystallized into some handy formula, like "No Popery", or "Tax the Foreigner", you would find multitudes to go to the stake for it. But you were planning to go to White Gables before the inquest, I think. You ought to be off if you are to get back to the court in time. I have something to attend to there myself, so we might walk up together. I will just go and get my camera.'

'By all means,' Mr Cupples answered; and they set off at once in the ever-growing warmth of the morning. The roof of White Gables, a surly patch of dull red against the dark trees, seemed to harmonize with Trent's mood; he felt heavy, sinister, and troubled. If a blow must fall that might strike down that creature radiant of beauty and life whom he had seen that morning, he did not wish it to come from his hand. An exaggerated chivalry had lived in Trent since the first teachings of his mother; but at this moment the horror of bruising anything so lovely was almost as much the artist's revulsion as the gentleman's. On the other hand, was the hunt to end in nothing? The quality of the affair was such that the thought of forbearance was an agony. There never was such a case; and he alone, he was confident, held the truth of it under his hand. At least, he determined, that day should show whether what he believed was a delusion. He would trample his compunction underfoot until he was quite sure that there was any call for it. That same morning he would know.

As they entered at the gate of the drive they saw Marlowe and the American standing in talk before the front door. In the shadow of the porch was the lady in black.

She saw them, and came gravely forward over the lawn, moving as Trent had known that she would move, erect and balanced, stepping lightly. When she welcomed him on Mr Cupples's presentation her eyes of golden-flecked brown observed him kindly. In her pale composure, worn as the mask of distress, there was no trace of the emotion that had seemed a halo about her head on the ledge of the cliff. She spoke the appropriate commonplace in a low and even voice. After a few words to Mr Cupples she turned her eyes on Trent again.

'I hope you will succeed,' she said earnestly. 'Do you think you will succeed?'

He made his mind up as the words left her lips. He said, 'I believe I shall do so, Mrs Manderson. When I have the case sufficiently complete I shall ask you to let me see you and tell you about it. It may be necessary to consult you before the facts are published.'

She looked puzzled, and distress showed for an instant in her eyes. 'If it is necessary, of course you shall do so,' she said.

On the brink of his next speech Trent hesitated. He remembered that the lady had not wished to repeat to him the story already given to the inspector—or to be questioned at all. He was not unconscious that he desired to hear her voice and watch her face a little longer, if it might be; but the matter he had to mention really troubled his mind, it was a queer thing that fitted nowhere into the pattern within whose corners he had by this time brought the other queer things in the case. It was very possible that she could explain it away in a breath; it was unlikely that any one else could. He summoned his resolution.

'You have been so kind,' he said, 'in allowing me access to the house and every opportunity of studying the case, that I am going to ask leave to put a question or two to yourself—nothing that you would rather not answer, I think. May I?'

She glanced at him wearily. 'It would be stupid of me to refuse, Ask your questions, Mr Trent.' 'It's only this,' said Trent hurriedly. 'We know that your husband lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you any idea why he should have done that?'

She opened her eyes in astonishment. 'I cannot imagine,' she said. 'I did not know he had done so. I am very much surprised to hear it.'

'Why is it surprising?'

'I thought my husband had very little money in the house. On Sunday night, just before he went out in the motor, he came into the drawing-room where I was sitting. He seemed to be irritated about something, and asked me at once if I had any notes or gold I could let him have until next day. I was surprised at that, because he was never without money; he made it a rule to carry a hundred pounds or so about him always in a note-case. I unlocked my escritoire, and gave him all I had by me. It was nearly thirty pounds.'

'And he did not tell you why he wanted it?'

'No. He put it in his pocket, and then said that Mr Marlowe had persuaded him to go for a run in the motor by moonlight, and he thought it might help him to sleep. He had been sleeping badly, as perhaps you know. Then he went off with Mr Marlowe. I thought it odd he should need money on Sunday night, but I soon forgot about it. I never remembered it again until now.'

'It was curious, certainly,' said Trent, staring into the distance. Mr Cupples began to speak to his niece of the arrangements for the inquest, and Trent moved away to where Marlowe was pacing slowly upon the lawn. The young man seemed relieved to talk about the coming business of the day. Though he still seemed tired out and nervous, he showed himself not without a quiet humour in describing the pomposities of the local police and the portentous airs of Dr Stock. Trent turned the conversation gradually toward the problem of the crime, and all Marlowe's gravity returned.

'Bunner has told me what he thinks,' he said when Trent referred to the American's theory. 'I don't find myself convinced by it, because it doesn't really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a characteristic feature of certain sections of the labour movement there. Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business. Do you know Huckleberry Finn?'

'Do I know my own name?' exclaimed Trent.

'Well, I think the most American thing in that great American epic is Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme, taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim, which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has its secret signs and handgrips. You've heard of the Know-Nothing movement in politics, I dare say, and the Ku Klux Klan. Then look at Brigham Young's penny-dreadful tyranny in Utah, with real blood. The founders of the Mormon State were of the purest Yankee stock in America; and you know what they did. It's all part of the same mental tendency. Americans make fun of it among themselves. For my part, I take it very seriously.'

'It can have a very hideous side to it, certainly,' said Trent, 'when you get it in connection with crime—or with vice—or even mere luxury. But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make life interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the matter in hand, however; has it struck you as a possibility that Manderson's mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner believes in? For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send you posting off like that in the middle of the night.'

'About ten o'clock, to be exact,' replied Marlowe. 'Though, mind you, if he'd actually roused me out of my bed at midnight I shouldn't have been very much surprised. It all chimes in with what we've just been saying. Manderson had a strong streak of the national taste for dramatic proceedings. He was rather fond of his well-earned reputation for unexpected strokes and for going for his object with ruthless directness through every opposing consideration. He had decided suddenly that he wanted to have word from this man Harris—'

'Who is Harris?' interjected Trent.

'Nobody knows. Even Bunner never heard of him, and can't imagine what the business in hand was. All I know is that when I went up to London last week to attend to various things I booked a deck-cabin, at Manderson's request, for a Mr George Harris on the boat that sailed on Monday. It seems that Manderson suddenly found he wanted news from Harris which presumably was of a character too secret for the telegraph; and there was no train that served; so I was sent off as you know.'

Trent looked round to make sure that they were not overheard, then faced the other gravely, 'There is one thing I may tell you,' he said quietly, 'that I don't think you know. Martin the butler caught a few words at the end of your conversation with Manderson in the orchard before you started with him in the car, He heard him say, "If Harris is there, every moment is of importance." Now, Mr Marlowe, you know my business here. I am sent to make enquiries, and you mustn't take offence. I want to ask you if, in the face of that sentence, you will repeat that you know nothing of what the business was.'

Marlowe shook his head. 'I know nothing, indeed. I'm not easily offended, and your question is quite fair. What passed during that conversation I have already told the detective. Manderson plainly said to me that he could not tell me what it was all about. He simply wanted me to find Harris, tell him that he desired to know how matters stood, and bring back a letter or message from him. Harris, I was further told, might not turn up. If he did, "every moment was of importance". And now you know as much as I do.'

'That talk took place before he told his wife that you were taking him for a moonlight run. Why did he conceal your errand in that way, I wonder.'

The young man made a gesture of helplessness. 'Why? I can guess no better than you.'

'Why,' muttered Trent as if to himself, gazing on the ground, 'did he conceal it—from Mrs Manderson?' He looked up at Marlowe.

'And from Martin,' the other amended coolly. 'He was told the same thing.'

With a sudden movement of his head Trent seemed to dismiss the subject. He drew from his breast-pocket a letter-case, and thence extracted two small leaves of clean, fresh paper.

'Just look at these two slips, Mr Marlowe,' he said. 'Did you ever see them before? Have you any idea where they come from?' he added as Marlowe-took one in each hand and examined them curiously.

'They seem to have been cut with a knife or scissors from a small diary for this year from the October pages,' Marlowe observed, looking them over on both sides. 'I see no writing of any kind on them. Nobody here has any such diary so far as I know. What about them?'

'There may be nothing in it,' Trent said dubiously. 'Any one in the house, of course, might have such a diary without your having seen it. But I didn't much expect you would be able to identify the leaves—in fact, I should have been surprised if you had.'

He stopped speaking as Mrs Manderson came towards them. 'My uncle thinks we should be going now,' she said.

'I think I will walk on with Mr Bunner,' Mr Cupples said as he joined them. 'There are certain business matters that must be disposed of as soon as possible. Will you come on with these two gentlemen, Mabel? We will wait for you before we reach the place.'

Trent turned to her. 'Mrs Manderson will excuse me, I hope,' he said. 'I really came up this morning in order to look about me here for some indications I thought I might possibly find. I had not thought of attending the—the court just yet.'

She looked at him with eyes of perfect candour. 'Of course, Mr Trent. Please do exactly as you wish. We are all relying upon you. If you will wait a few moments, Mr Marlowe, I shall be ready.'

She entered the house. Her uncle and the American had already strolled towards the gate.

Trent looked into the eyes of his companion. 'That is a wonderful woman,' he said in a lowered voice.

'You say so without knowing her,' replied Marlowe in a similar tone. 'She is more than that.'

Trent said nothing to this. He stared out over the fields towards the sea. In the silence a noise of hobnailed haste rose on the still air. A little distance down the road a boy appeared trotting towards them from the direction of the hotel. In his hand was the orange envelope, unmistakable afar off, of a telegram. Trent watched him with an indifferent eye as he met and passed the two others. Then he turned to Marlowe. 'A propos of nothing in particular,' he said, 'were you at Oxford?'

'Yes,' said the young man. 'Why do you ask?'

'I just wondered if I was right in my guess. It's one of the things you can very often tell about a man, isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' Marlowe said. 'Well, each of us is marked in one way or another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn't known it.'

'Why? Does my hair want cutting?'

'Oh, no! It's only that you look at things and people as I've seen artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to detail—rather looking them over than looking at them.'

The boy came up panting. 'Telegram for you, sir,' he said to Trent. 'Just come, sir.'

Trent tore open the envelope with an apology, and his eyes lighted up so visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe's tired face softened in a smile.

'It must be good news,' he murmured half to himself.

Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. 'Not exactly news,' he said. 'It only tells me that another little guess of mine was a good one.'



CHAPTER VIII: The Inquest

The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his work, and the news of Manderson's mysterious death within his jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A respectable capacity for marshalling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands, and sometimes disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.

The court was held in a long, unfurnished room lately built on to the hotel, and intended to serve as a ballroom or concert-hall. A regiment of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who knew Trent by sight assured the rest that he was not in the court.

The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness called, from whom the coroner, after some enquiry into the health and circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs Manderson was taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil before beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken composure of the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an impression of hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to be felt in her presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear that the force of a powerful character was at work to master the emotions of her situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her eyes with her handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.

Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour for retiring on Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always had a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom arrangements, and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been awake when he came up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened, when the light was switched on in her husband's room. She had spoken to him. She had no clear recollection of what she had said, as she had been very drowsy at the time; but she had remembered that he had been out for a moonlight run in the car, and she believed she had asked whether he had had a good run, and what time it was. She had asked what the time was because she felt as if she had only been a very short time asleep, and she had expected her husband to be out very late. In answer to her question he had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone on to say that he had changed his mind about going for a run.

'Did he say why?' the coroner asked.

'Yes,' replied the lady, 'he did explain why. I remember very well what he said, because—' she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.

'Because—' the coroner insisted gently.

'Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business affairs,' answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of defiance. 'He did not—did not think they would interest me, and as a rule referred to them as little as possible. That was why I was rather surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr Marlowe to Southampton to bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for Paris by the next day's boat. He said that Mr Marlowe could do it quite easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the car, and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better for it.'

'Did he say any more?'

'Nothing, as well as I remember,' the witness said. 'I was very sleepy, and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive.'

'And you heard nothing in the night?'

'No: I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven o'clock. She closed the door leading to my husband's room, as she always did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a great deal of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the morning. I had breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I heard that my husband's body had been found.' The witness dropped her head and silently waited for her dismissal.

But it was not to be yet.

'Mrs Manderson.' The coroner's voice was sympathetic, but it had a hint of firmness in it now. 'The question I am going to put to you must, in these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty to ask it. Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband had not been, for some time past, relations of mutual affection and confidence? Is it the fact that there was an estrangement between you?'

The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the colour rising in her cheeks. 'If that question is necessary,' she said with cold distinctness, 'I will answer it so that there shall be no misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband's life his attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had changed towards me; he had become very reserved, and seemed mistrustful. I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to be alone. I can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to work against it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I thought. Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never told me. My own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in so many words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had always been, so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know now what it was.' The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her self-control over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she had said this, and stood erect and quiet.

One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. 'Then was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between you and your husband, ma'am?'

'Never.' The word was colourlessly spoken; but every one felt that a crass misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a person like Mrs Manderson had been visited with some severity.

Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have been preying upon her husband's mind recently?

Mrs Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now eagerly directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.