idn't say a word!"

"Ah, words, idle words!

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

"It is actions that count, sir. Deeds, not words. Now, Mr. Robert has
been kind enough to give us the eloquent facts, because he will be
followed from the suburbs and his whereabouts watched most carefully."

"Dear me! I hadn't thought of that," said Hilton Fenley slowly. Two
ideas were probably warring in his brain at that moment. One classed
Furneaux as a garrulous idiot; the other suggested that there might be
method in such folly.

"That's a clever simile of Pope's about dense leaves betokening
scarcity of fruit," went on Furneaux. "Of course, it might be pushed
too far. Think what a poisonous Dead Sea apple the Quarry Wood
contained. Your father's murder might not have been possible today
but for the cover given by the trees."

Fenley selected a dark overcoat and derby hat. He wore a black tie,
but had made no other change in his costume.

"You are quite a literary detective, Mr. Furneaux," he commented.

"More literal than literary, sir. I have little leisure for reading,
but I own an excellent memory. Nothing to boast of in that. It's
indispensable in my profession."

"Obviously. Well, I must hurry away now. See you later."

He hastened out. His manner seemed to hint an annoyance; it conveyed
indefinitely but subtly a suggestion that his father's death was far
too serious a thing to be treated with such levity.

Furneaux sauntered slowly to the front door. By that time the Fenley
car was speeding rapidly down the avenue.

"With luck," he said to Winter, who had joined him, "with any sort of
luck both brothers should pass their father's body on the way to the
mortuary. Sometimes, O worthy chief, I find myself regretting the ways
and means of the days of old, when men believed in the Judicium Dei.

"Neither of those sons went near his dead father. If one of them had
dared I wonder whether the blood would have liquefied. Do you
remember, in the 'Nibelungenlied,' that Hagen is forced to prove his
innocence by touching Siegfried's corpse--and fails? That is the
point--he fails. Our own Shakespeare knew the dodge. When Henry VI was
being borne to Chertsey in an open coffin, the Lady Anne made Gloster
squirm by her cry:

"O gentlemen, see, see! Dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths, and bleed afresh.

"Why then d