everywhere, they never do, was absent. Absent too was
the customary watch. The precise use which a man of means and
particularly of leisure can have for a watch the police and press did
not stop to consider. The absence of watch and money suggested a
theory. That was enough.

The theory, however, like all theories, had its defects. Loftus had
been found within the park, a few feet from the fence. The shooting
might have occurred from without, but unless the assassin had a key
or a ladder or a balloon or wings he could not possibly have got in to
go through him. Eliminating ladder, balloon and wings, a key the
assassin could not have had unless he were a resident in the
neighborhood, the agent of a resident, or a caretaker of the park
itself. People of this order are as eliminable as balloons and wings.

The theory therefore had its defects. It had, though, this in its
favor--the lock of one of the gates might have been picked. It had
something else in its favor. It suited the Loftus clan.

Mrs. Loftus, though childless now, was not otherwise alone. Behind her
were all the Loftuses, a contingent of relatives socially eminent,
ponderable politically, super-respectable, synonymous with the best.
To them the death of Royal, however dismal, was not disgraceful--not
disgraceful, that is, assuming that it was a footpad's work. On their
escutcheon it put a mourning band but not a blackening blot. That blot
they feared. They had cause to. The dark, donjuanesque story about
Marie Leroy might have been followed by other stories darker still,
dirtier if possible, that would begrime them all.

The footpad theory they accepted therefore at once. Had they been
able, had circumstances favored them, had the man, for instance, been
shot in some way or in some place unknowable to the police, they
would have arranged to have had him die decorously, if suddenly, of
some genteel complaint, of appendicitis or pleuro-pneumonia. Then
there would have been no stories, no extras, no pictures, no
notoriety, no fear of that blot.

The fear subsisting, they accepted the footpad theory, glad to find it
ready-made, declining to consider any other, desisting from further
effort, hushing the matter as well as they could, refusing, though
urged, to offer a reward.

Yet, though the theory suited them it did not satisfy the public. It
was too tame. They demanded something else. That demand the press, as
was its duty, attempted to supply. Through me