he and I had driven
out from Berwick, and as soon as we had started homeward he fell into a
brown study and continued in it until we were in sight of the town.

"Hugh, my lad!" he suddenly exclaimed, at last starting out of his
reverie. "I'd give a good deal if I could see daylight in this affair!
I've had two-and-twenty years' experience of the law, and I've known some
queer matters, and some dark matters, and some ugly matters in my time;
but hang me if I ever knew one that promises to be as ugly and as dark
and as queer as this does--that's a fact!"

"You're thinking it's all that, Mr. Lindsey?" I asked, knowing him as I
did to be an uncommonly sharp man.

"I'm thinking there's more than meets the eye," he answered. "Bloody
murder we know there is--maybe there'll be more, or maybe there has been
more already. What was that deep old fish Gilverthwaite after? What took
place between Phillips's walking out of that inn at Coldstream Bridge and
your finding of his body? Who met Phillips? Who did him to his death? And
what were the two of 'em after in this corner of the country? Black
mystery, my lad, on all hands!"

I made no answer just then. I was thinking, wondering if I should tell
him about my meeting with Sir Gilbert Carstairs at the cross-roads. Mr.
Lindsey was just the man you could and would tell anything to, and it
would maybe have been best if I had told him of that matter there and
then. But there's a curious run of caution and reserve in our family. I
got it from both father and mother, and deepened it on my own account,
and I could not bring myself to be incriminating and suspicioning a man
whose presence so near the place of the murder might be innocent enough.
So I held my tongue.

"I wonder will all the stuff in the newspapers bring any one forward?" he
said, presently. "It ought to!--if there is anybody."

Nothing, however, was heard by the police or by ourselves for the next
three or four days; and then--I think it was the fourth day after the
inquest--I looked up from my desk in Mr. Lindsey's outer office one
afternoon to see Maisie Dunlop coming in at the door, followed by an
elderly woman, poorly but respectably dressed, a stranger.

"Hugh," said Maisie, coming up to my side, "your mother asked me to bring
this woman up to see Mr. Lindsey. She's just come in from the south, and
she says she's yon James Gilverthwaite's sister."

CHAPTER IX

THE MARINE-STORE DEALER

Mr. Lindsey was