venshaw. "Let us go down."

CHAPTER X

"Why should Robert commit suicide?"

That was the burden of Mrs. Pendleton's cry, then and afterwards. There
was an angry scene in the old cliff house between brother and sister
before the events of that night were concluded. She utterly refused to
accept Austin's theory that their brother, with his own hand, had
discharged the revolver bullet which had put an end to his life and
ambitions. Sitting bolt upright in indignant amazement, she rejected the
idea in the sharpest scorn. It was nothing to her that the police sergeant
from the churchtown shared her brother's view, and that Dr. Ravenshaw was
passively acquiescent. She brushed aside the plausible web of
circumstances with the impatient hand of an angry woman. They might talk
till Doomsday, but they wouldn't convince her that Robert, of all men, had
done anything so disgraceful as take his own life. Arguments and events,
the locked door and the inaccessible windows--pathetically masculine
insistence on mere details--were wasted on her. The marshalled array of
facts made not the slightest impression on her firm belief that Robert had
not shot himself.

Shaking a large finger of angry import at Austin, and addressing herself
to him alone, she had said--

"Robert has been murdered, Austin, I feel sure. I don't care what you say,
but if there's law in England I'll have his murderer discovered."

And with that conclusion she had indignantly left the house with her
husband, leaving her brother to walk back to his lodgings at the
churchtown in moody solitude across the rainy darkness of the moors.

For herself, she returned to her hotel to pass a sleepless night, tossing
by the side of her placidly unconscious husband as she passed the tragic
events of the night in review and vainly sought for some clue to the
mystery. The dreadful logic of the circumstances which pointed to suicide,
hammered at her consciousness with deadening persistence, but she
resolutely refused to give it entry. Why should Robert commit suicide? Why
indeed? It was the question which had sprung to her lips when she first
heard Austin's belief, and it was to that she now clung in the midst of
her agonizing doubts, as though the mere wordless insistence in her mind
made it an argument of negation which gathered force and cogency by
frequent repetition.

But in the mass of teeming thoughts which crowded her brain in the silence
of the small hours, s