"

"Shall we exchange notes?" Sir Timothy suggested gently. "It might be
interesting."

"As you will," Francis assented. "There is no particular secret in the
way I stumbled upon the truth. I was dining here that night, as you
know, with Andrew Wilmore, and while he was ordering the dinner and
talking to some friends, I went down to the American Bar to have a
cocktail. Miss Daisy Hyslop and Fairfax were seated there alone and
talking confidentially. Fairfax was insisting that Miss Hyslop should do
something which puzzled her. She consented reluctantly, and Fairfax then
hurried off to the theatre. Later on, Miss Hyslop and the unfortunate
young man occupied a table close to ours, and I happened to notice that
she made a point of leaving the restaurant at a particular time. While
they were waiting in the vestibule she grew very impatient. I was
standing behind them and I saw her glance at the clock just before she
insisted upon her companion's going out himself to look for a taxicab.
Ergo, one enquires at Fairfax's theatre. For that exact three-quarters
of an hour he is off the stage. At that point my interest in the matter
ceases. Scotland Yard was quite capable of the rest."

"Disappointing," Sir Timothy murmured. "I thought at first that you were
over-modest. I find that I was mistaken. It was chance alone which set
you on the right track."

"Well, there is my story, at any rate," Francis declared. "With how much
of your knowledge of the affair are you going to indulge me?"

Sir Timothy slowly revolved his brandy glass.

"Well," he said, "I will tell you this. The two young men concerned,
Bidlake and Fairfax, were both guests of mine recently at my country
house. They had discovered for one another a very fierce and reasonable
antipathy. With that recurrence to primitivism with which I have always
been a hearty sympathiser, they agreed, instead of going round their
little world making sneering remarks about each other, to fight it out."

"At your suggestion, I presume?" Francis interposed.

"Precisely," Sir Timothy assented. "I recommended that course, and I
offered them facilities for bringing the matter to a crisis. The fight,
indeed, was to have come off the day after the unfortunate episode which
anticipated it."

"Do you mean to tell me that you knew--" Francis began.

Sir Timothy checked him quietly but effectively.

"I knew nothing," he said, "except this. They were neither of them young
men of much