"Excuse me for differing with you, Madam, but you don't know what stuff the criminal classes are made of. _They_ don't mind. One more or less sent to kingdom come don't prey upon _their_ nerves. Where are they found, as a rule, when they do get nicked? Why at a theatre or in a music-hall, or at the Derby--and generally in ladies' society. The things you read of in novels, conscience, remorse, Banquo's ghost, don't trouble _them_." Mr. Japp apologised for having expressed himself so freely, and stood for a few minutes fingering the brim of his hat, waiting for Mrs. Provana to speak. Her speech just now had been a surprise to him, for never had he met with so silent a lady. Night after night she had listened hungrily to his statement of his day's progress, his suspicions, his glimpses of light, now seeming full of promise, and anon delusive. She had listened with keen attention; but she had expressed no opinion, and had asked no questions. And now for him--the accomplished Criminal Investigator, the man who had worked at the science of detection as superior persons work at the higher mathematics--to hear this lady say that the discovery of her husband's murderer did not matter, that, for her part, he might go about the world a free man, with nothing worse than a mind full of scorpions and a sleepless bed, seemed too monstrous for comprehension. She, to whom the murdered man had left millions, not to hunger for the ignominious death of his murderer! "It must be Christian Science," thought Mr. Japp, as he packed his portmanteau. "Nothing less can account for it." CHAPTER XVI Everybody in the Red Book had left London. The West End was a desert, and the shrill summons of the telephone was heard no more in Mayfair. Nobody, unless it were the caretaker, was being asked to luncheon or dinner, and the only tea-parties were in the basement, where the late lettuce had not yet given place to the early muffin. Only people with urgent and onerous business were to be found in London. Lord Okehampton was shooting grouse, and Lady Okehampton ought to have been doing an after-cure in Switzerland; but "the sad state of my poor niece after her husband's ghastly death, and the legal business connected with her colossal inheritance, make it impossible for me to leave town. Much as I need a complete change, I must stay here, while that poor child wants me." This was what Lady Okehampton wrote from her deserted house in Berkeley Square, to numerous friends, with more or less variation of phrase.