“Don’t worry about it, Birts; I know my man and I can trace him. Also I want to try and see if this cigarette box has anything to say. Well, so long—and keep your eyes open.” Now, as related at the end of the last chapter, Evelyn had found it impossible to rest, torn as she was with the conviction she could not dispel, that Celia, her own bosom friend, held the key to the dark mystery overshadowing the house. She had reached a pitch of weariness, mental even more than physical, when to keep still had become intolerable; she tried to read but could not fix her thoughts on the page. At last she left her room in despair and, drawn by a hateful but irresistible magnet, slowly descended the stairs towards the hall. When she reached the landing and turned to come down the straight flight of stairs to the spot where the body had been found, she saw the two men sitting with their backs to her, engaged in conversation. She stopped in some annoyance, having no wish to keep on running across Humblethorne, and was about to retire as quietly as she had come, when she heard his protest: “Indeed, I am not laughing at you, Birts; that is a fairly exact description of the man who got into the house last night,” and Birts’s self-conscious interpolation, “Yes, through that little window.” “Little window?” she thought, “why ‘little’?” Humblethorne’s rejoinder riveted her attention: it was the first she had heard of the broken pantry window. She stole down a couple of steps and heard every word of the remainder of their discussion. It was with a sudden shock for which she was wholly unprepared that she heard the words “the man on whose story so much depends.” After the momentary suspicion of Philip Castle of which she had been immediately ashamed she had entirely put him out of her head in connexion with the tragedy; all her mind was centred on the strange manner and wild words of Celia. When she had discovered the marks on the drawing-room window she had been acting on a mere impulse and, concentrating simply on the one fact before her eyes, had gone out to verify her discovery without reasoning beyond it. Humblethorne’s incautious comment on the character of those marks had turned her reason onto the dreadful significance which lay behind: the man who had left those footprints had been waiting to be let in, there was no hope of doubting the conclusion. In a flash her reason had been forced over her love to the truth. “John was——” Celia had begun in her extraordinary agitation at the idea of sending for him now—“here and I let him in,” finished reason in spite of all Evelyn could do to drive the thought away. It had swept in, overwhelmingly reinforced, at the way Celia received the news of Humblethorne’s visit to John’s room. So it was with a mixture of relief and indignation that she learnt that it was not Celia, but Philip who lay under the dreadful suspicion. That was ridiculous—and it was unjust.