roved him to be a liar. But I had more
than that to go upon. I said this afternoon that my reconstruction was
not wholly satisfactory, because there were several loose ends in it. At
that time I believed he was the murderer, and I was anxious to frighten
the truth out of him in order to see where my reconstruction was at
fault. His story proved that my original conception of the crime was the
correct one, and my mistake was in departing from it, and ignoring some
of my original clues in order to square the new facts with a fresh
theory. I should never have lost sight of my first conviction that there
were two persons in Mr. Glenthorpe's room the night he was murdered.

"When Benson told his story I asked myself, Could Charles' conduct be
dictated by the desire to have a hold over Benson--with a view to
blackmail later on? But he was not likely to risk his own neck by
becoming an accomplice in the concealment of the murdered man's body!
Charles, if he were innocent himself, must have thought that Benson was
the murderer. It was impossible that he could have come to any other
conclusion. He discovers a man washing blood off his hands at midnight,
and this man admits to him that he has just come from a room which he
had no right to enter, and found a dead man there. Why had Charles
believed--or pretended to believe--Benson's story?

"It came to me suddenly, with the recollection of the line under the
murdered man's window--one of the clues which I had discarded--and the
whole of this baffling sinister mystery became clear in my mind. The
murder was committed by Charles, who got out of the window by which he
had entered just before Benson came into the room. Charles saw a light
in the room he had left, and returned to the window to investigate.
Crouching outside the window, he saw Benson in the room, examining the
body, and it came into his mind as he watched that his employer had
conceived the same idea as himself--had seized on the presence of a
stranger staying at the inn in order to rob Mr. Glenthorpe, hoping that
the crime would be attributed to the man who slept in the next room.
Charles was quick to see how Benson's presence in the room might be
turned to his own advantage. Charles had taken precautions, in
committing the murder, to leave clues in the room which should direct
suspicion to Penreath, but the innkeeper's visit to the room suggested
to him an even better plan for securing his own safety. When Benson left