Locking up the dinghy in its shed, I made my way back through the shrubbery and let myself into the house. A good fire was still burning away brightly on the hearth, and our teacups and plates were scattered about the table just as we had left them. I thought of ringing for Bascomb and telling him to clear away, but a sudden disinclination to see anyone checked my purpose. I walked across to the fireplace, and, thrusting an empty pipe between my teeth, dropped down again into my customary chair. There I sat, thinking over Christine's story. She had told it so simply and naturally that even at the time I had felt a curious absence of surprise. Strange as the truth was, it had, too, only confirmed my own belief that somewhere far back in Mr. Richard Jannaway's chequered past lay the real source of all my present troubles. And yet, judged by any conceivable standard of the quiet English countryside about us, what an amazing tale it was! That bloody massacre in the sunlit streets of Rio, the long untiring search for vengeance, the death of my uncle at the very moment when an implacable fate was closing in about him--it all seemed more like the plot of some fantastic drama than a real sequence of actual events in which I was intimately and urgently concerned. For de Roda himself I felt nothing but the most profound pity. I knew something of South American prisons, and I could well imagine the horrors of that six years' purgatory. To have come through it alive, and then at the last hour to have been cheated out of his revenge, was, in my eyes at least, quite sufficient to excuse the slight trace of homicidal mania with which he appeared to be afflicted.