er along the road, about a quarter
of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those
two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good.'

'So long as they have a cask of beer,' said Trent, 'they are all right.
We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives
prevent from luxury's contagion, weak and vile! Till then, goodbye.' He
strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr. Cupples,
and was gone.

The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped
his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. 'He
is a dear fellow,' he murmured. 'The best of fellows. And a terribly
acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!'

CHAPTER IV: Handcuffs in the Air

A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had while yet in his
twenties achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit
of leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father's name had helped;
a patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
deeper than popularity. His judgement of persons was penetrating, but
its process was internal; no one felt on good behaviour with a man
who seemed always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for
floods of nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face
seldom lost its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound
knowledge of his art and its history, his culture was large and loose,
dominated by a love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the
age of laughter and adventure.

His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work
had won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
rare in our country--a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
discussed among his friends, and set himself