efore this turn the grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate
at the angle of the boundary hedge. He approached this gate, which was
plainly for the use of gardeners and the service of the establishment;
it swung easily on its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led
towards the back of the house between the outer hedge and a tall wall of
rhododendrons. Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little
neatly-built erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a
corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house;
a servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier
hours of the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she
wondered what it could be like to be as rich as Manderson.

He examined the place carefully, and ransacked the hut within, but he
could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he
searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
fruitless.

It was interrupted by the sound--the first he had heard from the
house--of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
the house in the direction of the great gate.

At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's
face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their
tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other,
Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe,
strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it, in
his handsome, regular features, in his short, smooth yellow hair and in
his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of
training was confessed. "Oxford was your playground, I think, my young
friend," said Trent to himself.

"If you are Mr. Trent," said the young man pleasantly, "you are
expected. Mr. Cupples 'phoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe."

"You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe," said Trent. He was
much inclined to like young Mr. Marlowe. Though he seemed so near a
physical break-down, he gave out none the less that air of clean living
and inward health that is the peculiar glory of his soc