I wonder whether the surmise has dawned on you that was now beginning to dawn on me? I admit that I had none but the very slightest grounds for it, and that even these were more exclusions than affirmations; but in the absence of anything more positive they had to serve. Think for a moment how we men, solemnly, ponderously and sure that we were doing the decent thing, had decided that at all costs certain facts of our Case should be kept from the womenfolk. To that end we had evaded, temporized, shuffled. And now suppose--just suppose--that all our care and concealment had been wasted, and that two of the women at any rate knew as much as Philip Esdaile knew and far, far more than any of the rest of us? Mind you, I was only guessing; but I began rather to fancy my guess. If there was little for it, I could see nothing against it. Certain things, moreover, were distinctly in its favor. Why this remarkable brightening in Mollie's manner, this change from her dizzy little stagger over those strips of inverted sky when I had first produced that ring to her air of lightsome raillery now? Why this quick instinctive taking of sex-sides, this sudden practical decision to seek out Audrey Cunningham this very day and to have her down to Santon? It was not the ring at all; it was--could only be--the place in which the ring had been found. Always, always we came back to that hole in the studio floor at which Philip's eye could not possibly have been at the moment of the crash that May morning. Somewhere between the hole and the cellar the elusive explanation lay. I had been thwarted, Mackwith knew nothing about it, and Hubbard could only grunt and mumble about periscopes and sound-ranging and selenium cells; but Mollie, I was persuaded, knew. And what I had just told her, which she had not hitherto known, was that Audrey Cunningham shared the knowledge with her. PART IX WHAT PHILIP KNEW I The other day, accompanied by an engineer acquaintance, I was pottering about certain new excavations in the heart of London, and came upon a number of heaps of crushed and broken-up concrete, evidently the remains of old foundations. Yet those foundations could not have been very old, since I myself could remember the buildings of which they had been the support, and these had been old-fashioned rather than old. One of them had been a theater, another an hotel; and I stood there with my friend, looking over the waste of rubbish and barrows and wheeling-planks and thrown-up London clay, trying to evoke in my mind the exact plan of those vanished streets of thirty-odd years ago.