"This is a funny business," he communed. "There isn't enough evidence against Corbett to hang a cat, yet I _think_ he's the man. And Bruce is a queer chap. Was he cut up about me finding the letter, or has he got some notion in his head. He's as close as an oyster. I wonder if he _did_ dine at Hampstead on the evening of the murder, as he said at the inquest? I must inquire into it." CHAPTER XV MRS. HILLMER HESITATES "I wonder if I shall have such exciting times to-day as I had yesterday," said Bruce to himself, as he unfolded his _Times_ next morning at breakfast. Affairs had so jumbled themselves together in his brain the previous evening that he had abandoned all effort to elucidate them. He retired to rest earlier than usual, to sleep soundly, save for a vivid dream in which he was being tried for his life, the chief witnesses against him being Mrs. Hillmer, Phyllis Browne, and Jane Harding, the latter varying her evidence by entertaining the Court with a song and dance. The weather, too, had improved. It was clear, frosty, and sunlit--one of those delightful days of winter that serve as cheerful remembrances during periods of seemingly interminable fog overhead and slush beneath. During a quiet meal he read the news, and, with the invaluable morning smoke, settled himself cosily into an armchair to consider procedure. In the first place he carefully weighed those utterances of Mensmore at Monte Carlo, which he could recall, and which seemed by the light of later knowledge, to bear upon the case. Mensmore had alluded to "family troubles," to "worries," and "anxieties," that practically drove him from England. Some of these, no doubt, referred to the Springbok speculation. Others, again, might have meant Mrs. Hillmer or some other presently unknown relative. But in Mensmore's manner there was nothing that savored of a greater secrecy than the natural reticence of a gentleman in discussing domestic affairs with a stranger. This man had practically been snatched from death. At such a moment it was inconceivable that he could cloak the remorse of a murderer by the simulation of more honorable motives, in themselves sufficiently distressing to cause him deliberately to choose suicide as the best way of ending his difficulties. The policeman had summarized the testimony against Corbett as insufficient to curtail the remarkable powers of endurance of a cat. But to Bruce the case against Mensmore, alias Corbett, stood in clearer perspective. Now that he calmly reasoned the matter he felt that the balance of probabilities swung away from the hypothesis that Mensmore was the actual slayer of Lady Dyke, and towards the theory that he was in some way bound up with her death, whether knowingly or unknowingly it was at present impossible to say. The new terror to Bruce was Mr. White.