something about _him_! At the inquest my partner, old
Munby, made out--"

"Has there been an inquest already? Oh, of course there must have been,"
said Maitland, whose mind had run so much on Margaret's disappearance
that he had given little of his thoughts (weak and inconsecutive enough
of late) to the death of her father.

"Of course there has been an inquest Have you not read the papers since
you were ill?"

Now, Maitland had the common-room back numbers of the _Times_ since the
day of his return from Devonshire in his study at that very moment
But his reading, so far, had been limited to the "Agony Column" of the
advertisements (where he half hoped to find some message), and to
all the paragraphs headed "Strange Occurrence" and "Mysterious
Disappearance." None of these had cast any light on the fortunes of
Margaret.

"I have not seen anything about the inquest," he said. "What verdict did
they bring in? The usual one, I suppose--'Visitation,' and all that kind
of thing, or 'Death from exposure while under the influence of alcoholic
stimulants.'"

"That's exactly what they made it," said Barton; "and I don't blame
them; for the medical evidence my worthy partner gave left them no other
choice. You can see what he said for yourself in the papers."

Barton had been turning over the file of the _Times_, and showed
Maitland the brief record of the inquest and the verdict; matters so
common that their chronicle might be, and perhaps is, kept stereotyped,
with blanks for names and dates.

"A miserable end," said Maitland, when he had perused the paragraph.
"And now I had better go on with my story? But what did you mean by
saying you didn't 'blame' the coroner's jury?"

"Have you any more story? Is it not enough? I don't know that I should
tell you; it is too horrid!"

"Don't keep anything from me, please," said Maitland, moving nervously.
"I must know everything."

"Well," answered Barton, his voice sinking to a tone of reluctant
horror--"well, your poor friend was _murdered!_ That's what I meant when
I said I did not blame the jury; they could have given no other verdict
than they did on the evidence of my partner."

Murder! The very word has power to startle, as if the crime were a new
thing, not as old (so all religions tell us) as the first brothers. As
a meteoric stone falls on our planet, strange and unexplained, a waif of
the universe, from a nameless system, so the horror of murder descends
on us, w