lations between the young husband and the arrested
girl, in order to whet the public appetite for the "remarkable
revelations" which it was hoped would be brought forward at the trial.

"I have come to consult you about the murder of my wife," continued
Phil, speaking with an evident effort. "I should like you to make some
investigations."

Colwyn was sufficiently false to his own philosophy of life to
experience a feeling which he would have been the first to admit was
surprise.

"The police have already made an arrest in the case," he said.

"I believe they have arrested an innocent girl."

As the young man sat there, he looked so worn and ill that Colwyn felt
his sympathy go out to him. He seemed too boyish and frail to bear such
a weight of tragedy on his shoulders at the outset of his life. His face
wore an aspect of despair.

"If you think that a mistake has been made, you had better go to
Scotland Yard," said Colwyn.

"I have already spoken to Detective Caldew, but his attitude convinced
me that it was hopeless to expect any assistance from Scotland Yard, so
I decided to come to you."

"In that case you had better tell me all that you know, if you wish me
to help you," said the detective. "In the first place, I wish to hear
all the facts of the murder itself. I have read the newspaper accounts,
but they necessarily lack those more intimate details which may mean so
much. I should like to hear everything from beginning to end."

In a voice which was still weak from illness, Phil did as he was
requested, and related the strange sequence of events which had happened
at the moat-house on the night of his wife's murder. Those events, as he
described them, took on a new complexion to his listener, suggesting a
deeper and more complex mystery than the newspaper accounts of the
crime.

From the first the moat-house murder had appealed to Colwyn's
imagination and stimulated his intellectual curiosity. There was the
pathos of the youth and sex of the victim, murdered in a peaceful
country home. The terrible primality of murder accords more easily with
the elemental gregariousness of slum existence; its horror is
accentuated, by force of contrast, in the tender simplicity of an
English sylvan setting. Colwyn's chief interest lay in the fact that,
although the case against Hazel Rath was as strong as circumstantial
evidence could make it, the supposed motive for the crime was weak. But
he reflected that there di