usedly? Yet again, I recalled
his demeanour when Mrs. Stimcoe handed me the letter, and the
impression it gave me--so puzzling at the moment--that he had
foreknowledge of the news. If this incredible thing were true--if
Captain Branscome were the criminal--the puzzle ceased to be a
puzzle; the guinea and the broken cashbox were only too fatally
accounted for.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the guinea, in spite even of the
eyeglass there in my hand, I could not bring myself to believe.
What? Captain Branscome, the simple-minded, the heroic? Captain
Branscome, of the threadbare coat and the sword of honour? Poor he
was, no doubt--bitterly poor--poor almost to starvation at times.
To what might not a man be driven by poverty in this degree?
And here was evidence for judge and jury.

I glanced around me, and, folding the eyeglasses together in a
fumbling haste, slipped them into my breeches-pocket. From my seat
beneath the flagstaff I looked straight into the doorway of the
summer-house; but a creeper obscured its rustic window, dimming the
light within; and a terror seized me that some one was concealed
there, watching me--a terror not unlike that which had held me in
Captain Coffin's lodgings.

While I stood there, summoning up courage to invade the summer-house
and make sure, my brain harked back to Captain Coffin and the man
Aaron Glass. Captain Coffin had taken leave of me in a fever to
reach Minden Cottage. That was close on sixty hours ago--three
nights and two days. Why, in that ample time, had he not arrived,
and what had become of him? Plinny had seen no such man.

I fetched a tight grip on my courage, walked across to the doorway,
and peered into the summer-house. It was empty, and I stepped
inside--superstitiously avoiding, as I did so, to tread on the spot
where my father's body had lain.

Ann the cook--so Plinny told me--had found his chair overset behind
him, but no other sign of a struggle. He had been stabbed in front,
high on the left breast and a little below the collar-bone, and must
have toppled forward at once across the step, and died where he fell.
The chair had been righted and set in place, perhaps by Ann when she
washed down the step. A well-defined line across the floor showed
where the cleaning had begun, and behind it the scanty furniture of
the place had not been disturbed. At the back, in one corner stood
an old drum, with dust and droppings of leaf-mould in the wrinkles