nce."

"I hope the ladies were not much upset when you told them,"
Gifford remarked.

"Well, they already had an idea that something was seriously wrong, and
that took the edge off the announcement. Of course they were horribly
shocked at the idea of the tragedy so close at hand, though I softened
the details as well as I could."

"If the suicide idea is to be abandoned," said Kelson, speaking with an
unusually gloomy, preoccupied air, "the police have an uncommonly
difficult and delicate task before them."

"Yes, indeed," Morriston responded. "And I should say that abnormally
keen person, the brother, will keep them up to collar."

"He means to," Kelson replied rather grimly. "We had him for an hour
last night cross-examining us, naturally to no purpose; we could tell
him nothing."

"He won't leave a stone unturned," Morriston said. "He proposes to return
here after the funeral in town."

"And I should say," observed Kelson, "if the mystery is to be solved he
is the man to solve it. What do you think, Hugh?"

Gifford seemed to rouse himself by an effort from an absorbing train of
thought. "Oh, yes," he answered. "Except that it is possible to be a
little too clever and so overlook the obvious."

"If," said Morriston, obsessed by the subject, "the case is not one of
suicide it must be one of murder. Where is Mr. Gervase Henshaw, or any
one else, going to look for the criminal?"

"Not among your guests, let's hope," Kelson said with a touch of
uneasiness.

"For one thing," Morriston replied, "they, or a good part of them, were
not exactly my guests. I can't tell who may have got a ticket and been
present. There was a great crowd. We may have easily rubbed shoulders
with the murderer, if murder it was."

"Yes, so we may," said Kelson alertly, though with something of a
shudder.

"Not a pleasant idea," continued Morriston. "But I don't see, if a bad
character did get in and mix with the company, why he should have done a
fellow guest to death, nor how he contrived to leave his victim and get
out of the room after he had locked the door."

"If the two men had a row over a girl, or anything else," Kelson said,
"there is still that difficulty to be surmounted."

Gifford spoke. "From what one could judge of the dead man's personality
and character it is not a far-fetched supposition that he must have
had enemies."

"Down here?" Morriston objected incredulously. "Where he was a stranger?
Unless some ingeni