ll it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation ...
genius, is the right word."

He looked up at the clock.

"We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing; listen to
this final case."

The narrative of the diary follows:

The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with dust. Her
arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the exquisite mouth
was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with the terrible stiffened
celerity of a human creature when it is trapped and ruined.

Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at the end
of a long lane of ancient poplars.

This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big
red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the
turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from
a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer
night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.

He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his horse.

The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made
a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a
breath of chill came out of the hollows with the sunset.

The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down into the
road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw who it was, and
spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person in extremity.

"Is the thing a lie?" she said.

"What thing, child?" replied my father.

"The thing he told me!"

"Dillworth?" said my father. "Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?"

The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. "In all the
world," she said, "is there any other man who would have told me?"

My father's face hardened as if of metal. "What did he tell you?"

The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without
equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:

"He said that my father was not dead; that I was the daughter of a
thief; that what I believed about my father was all made up to save the
family name; that the truth was my father robbed him, stole his best
horse and left the country when I was a baby. He said I was a burden on
him, a pensioner, a drone; and to go and seek my father."

And suddenly she broke into a flood of tears. Her face pressed against
my father's shoulder. He took her up in his big arms and got into his
saddle.

"My child," he said, "let us ta