ry."

"Now, how do you know that, Mr. Cazalette?" I asked, feeling a bit
restive under the old fellow's cock-sureness. "Isn't that guess-work?"

"No!" said he. "It's deduction--and common-sense. Mine's a nature
that's full of both those highly admirable qualities, Middlebrook."

He went away then, as silently as he had come. And when, a few minutes
later, I, too, went off to some preliminary work that I had begun in
the library, I began to think over the first events of the morning,
and to wonder if I ought not to ask Mr. Cazalette for some explanation
of the incident of the yew-hedge. He had certainly secreted a piece of
blood-stained, mud-discoloured linen in that hedge for an hour or so.
Why? Had it anything to do with the crime? Had he picked it up on the
beach when he went for his dip? Why was he so secretive about it? And
why, if it was something of moment, had he not carried it straight to
his own room in the house, instead of hiding it in the hedge while he
evidently went back to the house and made his toilet? The circumstance
was extraordinary, to say the least of it.

But on reflection I determined to hold my tongue and abide my time.
For anything I knew, Mr. Cazalette might have cut one of his feet on
the sharp stones on the beach, used his handkerchief to staunch the
wound, thrown it away into the hedge, and then, with a touch of native
parsimony, have returned to recover the discarded article. Again, he
might be in possession of some clue, to which his tobacco-box
investigations were ancillary--altogether, it was best to leave him
alone. He was clearly deeply interested in the murder of Salter Quick,
and I had gathered from his behaviour and remarks that this sort of
thing--investigation of crime--had a curious fascination for him. Let
him, then, go his way; something, perhaps, might come of it. One thing
was very sure, and the old man had grasped it readily--this crime was
no ordinary one.

As the twilight approached, making my work in the library impossible,
and having no wish to go on with it by artificial light, I went out
for a walk. The fascination which is invariably exercised on any of us
by such affairs led me, half-unconsciously, to the scene of the
murder. The tide, which had been up in the morning, was now out,
though just beginning to turn again, and the beach, with its masses
of bare rock and wide-spreading deposits of sea-weed, looked bleak and
desolate in the uncertain grey light. But i