?"

"I have only been partially successful," Mark said. "I have identified
the writing with a signature of a guest in the visitors' book. The lady
came only yesterday, as the date is opposite her writing. She came
without a maid and with very little luggage, and she called herself Mrs.
Beacon Light."

"Beacon Light," Beatrice said reflectively. "It sounds like a _nom de
plume_; it suggests the kind of name a lady novelist would assume. Too
singular to be real. And are you quite sure that the lady wrote that
letter to my father?"

"I should say there is very little doubt about it," Mark replied. "The
handwritings are identical. It seems that Mrs. Beacon Light stayed here
last night and dined in the red salon. She had breakfast here very
early, and then she paid her bill and departed. The clerk cannot say
where she went, for her small amount of baggage was placed in a hansom
and the driver was told to go in the first instance to Peter Robinson's.
That is everything that I could ascertain."

There was no more to be said for the present, and very little to be
done. A tall, stiff man, with an air of Scotland Yard indelibly
impressed upon him, came presently, and asked to be allowed to see Sir
Charles's suite of rooms. He had been waited upon at his office, he
explained, by the deceased baronet's medical man, who had suggested the
necessity for an inquest, which had been fixed upon for ten o'clock the
following day. Under the circumstances the suite of rooms would be
locked up and the seal of authority placed on them. The inspector was
sincerely sorry to cause all this trouble and worry to Miss Darryll, but
she would quite see that he was doing no more than his duty.

"But why all this fuss?" Stephen Richford demanded. He had come up at
the same moment. Troubled and dazed as Beatrice was, she could not help
noticing that Richford had been drinking. The thing was so unusual that
it stood out all the more glaringly. "There's no occasion for an
inquest. Dr. Oswin has told me more than once lately that Sir Charles
was giving his heart a great deal too much to do. This thing has got to
be prevented, I tell you."

"Very sorry, sir," the inspector said politely; "but it is already out
of private hands. Both Dr. Oswin and Dr. Andrews have suggested an
inquest; they have notified us, and, if they wished to change their
minds now, I doubt if my chief would permit them."

Richford seemed to be on the point of some passionate out