conceived itinerary of events needed the support of
proof, and there Barrant found himself in difficulty.

The morning's enquiries made it manifest that Sisily had left Penzance by
the mid-day train on the previous day. After leaving Mrs. Pendleton,
Barrant had gone to the station. The sour and elderly ticket-clerk on duty
could give him no information, but let it be understood that there was
another clerk selling tickets for the mid-day train, which was unusually
crowded by farmers going to Redruth. The other clerk, seen in the morning,
had no difficulty in recalling the young lady of Barrant's description.
She was pretty and slight and dark, with a pale clear complexion, and she
carried a small handbag. She asked for a ticket to London. The clerk
understood her to ask for a return ticket, but as she picked it up with
the change for the five pound note with which she paid for it, she said
that she thought she had asked for a single ticket. He assured her that
she had not, but offered to change it. At that moment the departure of the
train was signalled, and she ran through the barrier without waiting to
change the ticket. The incident caused him to observe her, and his
description tallied so completely with Mrs. Pendleton's description that
Barrant had not the least doubt that it was Sisily.

On the strength of this information Barrant applied to a local magistrate
for a warrant for the girl's arrest. He was well aware that he had not yet
gathered sufficient evidence to satisfy the law that she had murdered her
father, but his action was justified by her flight and the presumption of
her secret visit to her father's house when she was supposed to be in bed
and asleep at the hotel.

These things fulfilled, Barrant then applied his mind to the question of
Thalassa's complicity. If Sisily's actions on the night of her father's
death, and her subsequent flight, simplified matters to the extent of
deepening the assumption of murder into a practical certainty, they added
to the complexity of the case by giving it the appearance of a carefully
planned crime in which Thalassa seemed to be deeply involved.

The insistent necessity of motive which should explain the events of that
night with apt presumptions, threw Barrant back on the suggestion, made by
Austin Turold, that it was really Sisily whom Mrs. Pendleton had detected
looking through the door of the downstairs room when the other members of
the family were assembled