etween them when I was a girl, but nothing came of it.
It's my opinion that Miss Heredith must have refused him then because of
his wild days, and he took to his travels to cure his broken heart. But
they still think a lot of each other, as is plain for everybody to see,
and go out for walks together arm in arm. So perhaps it will all come
right in the end."

With this comfortable doctrine of life, based on her perusal of female
romances, Mrs. Lumbe got up from her seat to clear the table.

"I trust it will," said her brother, but his remark had nothing to do
with the triumph of true love in the last chapter.

He left the room to get his bicycle to ride to Chidelham.

CHAPTER XI

On his way to Chidelham, Caldew again pondered over the murder, and for
the first time seriously asked himself whether Miss Heredith could have
committed the crime. He had glanced at that possibility before, and had
practically dismissed it on the score of lack of motive, but his
sister's story of the differences between Miss Heredith and her nephew's
wife supplied that deficiency in a startling degree. In reviewing the
whole of the circumstances by the light of the information his sister
had given him, it now seemed to him that Miss Heredith fitted into the
crime in a remarkable way.

The most important fact leading to that inference was that she alone, of
all the inmates of the moat-house the previous night, was out of the
dining-room when the murder was committed. That supposition took no
cognizance of the servants, but Caldew had all along eliminated the
servants in his consideration of the crime. In the next place, it
supplied an explanation for the disappearance of the bar brooch from the
bedroom. In all likelihood the butler had first acquainted his mistress
with his discovery of the unlocked staircase door, and she, realizing
where she had dropped her brooch, had seized upon the opportunity to
request Musard to call the detective downstairs and tell him about the
door. In his absence she returned to the bedroom for the brooch.

This theory seemed plausible enough at first blush, but as Caldew
examined it closely several objections arose in his mind. The hidden
motive of the crime, as innocently laid bare by his sister, was strong,
but was it strong enough to impel a woman like Miss Heredith, with the
rigid principles of her birth, breeding, and caste, and a woman,
moreover, who had spent her life in good works, to commit