e, infinitely
pathetic but unconscious, touched her face. Even in grief the beauty
of the woman was remarkable; and to Brendon, whose private emotions
already struck into the present demands upon his intellect, she
appeared exquisite. As he left her he hoped that a great problem lay
before him. He desired to impress her--he looked forward with a
passing exaltation quite foreign from his usual staid and cautious
habit of mind; he even repeated to himself a pregnant saying that he
had come across in a book of quotations, though he knew not the
author of it.

"There is an hour in which a man may be happy all his
life, can he but find it."

Then he grew ashamed of himself and felt something like a blush
suffuse his plain features.

At the police station a car was waiting for him and in twenty
minutes he had reached Foggintor. Picking his way past the fishing
pools and regarding the frowning cliffs and wide spaces of the
quarry under a mournful mist, Mark proceeded to the aperture at the
farther end. Then he left the rill which ran out from this exit and
soon stood by the bungalow. It was now the dinner hour. Half a
dozen masons and carpenters were eating their meal in a wooden shed
near the building and with them sat two constables and their
superior officer.

Inspector Halfyard rose as Brendon appeared, came forward, and shook
hands.

"Lucky you was on the spot, my dear," he said in his homely Devon
way. "Not that it begins to look as if there was anything here deep
enough to ask for your cleverness."

Inspector Halfyard stood six feet high and had curiously broad,
square shoulders; but his imposing torso was ill supported. His legs
were very thin and long, and they turned out a trifle. With his
prominent nose, small head, and bright little slate-grey eyes, he
looked rather like a stork. He was rheumatic, too, and walked
stiffly.

"This here hole is no place for my legs," he confessed. "But from
the facts, so far as we've got 'em, Foggintor quarry don't come into
the story, though it looks as if it ought to. But the murder was
done here--inside this bungalow--and the chap that's done it hadn't
any use for such a likely sort of hiding-place."

"Have you searched the quarries'?"

"Not yet. 'Tis no good turning fifty men into this jakes of a hole
till we know whether it will be needful; but all points to somewhere
else. A terrible strange job--so strange, in fact, that we shall
probably find a crimin