But for all this we had to wait. My speculations were suddenly cut short. There was another ring at the door, and Esdaile rose. But before going to see who it was this time he took the precaution of once more putting Monty's pistol away in the escritoire drawer. It was well for our Case, as a Case, that he did so. We heard voices in the passage, Esdaile's own tenor and a deeper voice. Then I heard him say, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in." The next moment he stood holding the door open for a Police Inspector to pass. PART III WHAT THE WOMEN DID I For a great number of years past, innumerable reviewers have been so kind as to class me as "one of the younger novelists," and with the passing of time I have acquired a certain affection for the status. But I have to confess myself unlike my brethren in this--I don't know all about women. Indeed, twenty Philip Esdailes poking about twenty cellars are clearer to me than some of the mental processes of such a person as (say) Miss Joan Merrow. For instance, she once told me that she would be terrified to go up in a machine. She told me this (as I subsequently learned) within a very few hours of a side-slip at a few hundred feet that had fairly "put the wind up" Chummy Smith, her companion in this (by Philip) strictly forbidden adventure. Some chance remark of her own revealed all this to me weeks later, and our eyes met, mine sternly accusing, hers of limpid periwinkle blue. Then she had the effrontery to take me aside, to put her arm inside mine, and to whisper that she knew she could "trust" me! "Trust," indeed! So, as far as Miss Merrow is my informant for the part of our Case I am now coming to, you are warned what to expect. II Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very poultry of its farmyards. The only tiny thing about it is its church, and this stands in the middle of a daisied field, not by any means one of the largest, but that can hardly be less than a hundred acres. There is a shop-post-office, a short street mostly laithes as big as airship hangars, an opaque horse-pond, and a single telegraph wire the posts of which can be seen for miles diminishing away over the Wolds. The few trees are mostly thorn, all blown one way by the wind and as stiff and compact as wire mattresses.