"It is _not_ an ordinary case. If it were, I shouldn't know as much as I do, little as that is; the ordinary cases are always difficult. The assailant did not come to commit a burglary, although he was a skilled burglar, or one of them was, if more than one were concerned. The affair has, I think, nothing to do with the expected wedding, nor had Mr. Campbell anything to do in it--at any rate, personally--nor the gardener. The criminal (or one of them) was known personally to the dead man, and was well-dressed: he (or again one of them, and I think there were two) even had a chat with Mr. Kingscote before the murder took place. He came to ask for something which Mr. Kingscote was unwilling to part with,--perhaps hadn't got. It was not a bulky thing. Now you have all my materials before you." "But all this doesn't look like the result of the blind spite that would ruin a man's work first and attack him bodily afterwards." "Spite isn't always blind, and there are other blind things besides spite; people with good eyes in their heads are blind sometimes, even detectives." "But where did you get all this information? What makes you suppose that this was a burglar who didn't want to burgle, and a well-dressed man, and so on?" Hewitt chuckled and smiled again. "I saw it--saw it, my boy, that's all," he said. "But here comes the train." On the way back to town, after I had rather minutely described Kingscote's work on the boarding-house panels, Hewitt asked me for the names and professions of such fellow lodgers in that house as I might remember. "When did you leave yourself?" he ended. "Three years ago, or rather more. I can remember Kingscote himself; Turner, a medical student--James Turner, I think; Harvey Challitt, diamond merchant's articled pupil--he was a bad egg entirely, he's doing five years for forgery now; by the bye he had the room we are going to see till he was marched off, and Kingscote took it--a year before I left; there was Norton--don't know what he was; 'something in the City,' I think; and Carter Paget, in the Admiralty Office. I don't remember any more at this moment; there were pretty frequent changes. But you can get it all from Mrs. Lamb, of course." "Of course; and Mrs. Lamb's exact address is--what?" I gave him the address, and the conversation became disjointed. At Farringdon station, where we alighted, Hewitt called two hansoms. Preparing to enter one, he motioned me to the other, saying, "You get straight away to Mrs. Lamb's at once. She may be going to burn that splintered wood, or to set things to rights, after the manner of her kind, and you can stop her. I must make one or two small inquiries, but I shall be there half an hour after you." "Shall I tell her our object?" "Only that I may be able to catch her mischievous lodgers--nothing else yet." He jumped into the hansom and was gone.