Luncheon over, she threw herself down into a low basket chair, and gave herself entirely to a reconsideration of everything she had discovered. The most important point to be decided was, who had left that larger footmark in replacing the statuette? It was not John, it was not Philip. Who else could it possibly have been? As if in reply to the reiterated question, there was a discreet knock on the door and Fairlie entered. He bent in his habitual manner of semi-apology when delivering a message and said that her ladyship would be glad if Miss Celia would come and sit with her that afternoon. Evelyn, reclining in her chair, suddenly grew rigid: her eyes had fallen upon his shoes. She glanced away hurriedly, fearful of betraying the agitation in her mind; her thoughts had received their answer. Two men remained who could have broken that window, Fairlie and the footman. The latter she put out of her reckoning at once; he was an ordinary, unintelligent, unresourceful lad, who had only been there a few months. He had never known John; he could not have played a part afterwards in any case even to save his neck from the gallows. She could not conceive any reason, except robbery—and of that there was no trace here—why he should murder his master. But Fairlie was a being of very different fibre. No one could ever guess at the thoughts lying hid in that silent soul beneath his stolid mask of dignified imperturbability. Whatever he had done, he was capable, if he chose, of concealing it. Evelyn was too fresh from the complete upsetting of all her reasoning to leap at once to new conclusions of guilt; she was grown more moderate in her imaginings and no longer felt assured that any picture her mind painted was necessarily the truth. But she realized in an instant the possibilities of this new thought. Fairlie had been devoted to John as a little child. Whatever had happened it would have been his first thought to avoid running the risk of implicating John. She did not go so far in her thoughts as to say Fairlie struck Sir Roger down, but she saw that he might have done so; he might for instance have intervened in a quarrel. As to all that she did not know and refused, as far as she could, to speculate upon thoughts alone; but at any rate Fairlie might have let John out, Fairlie might have broken the window—no one more likely. It was obvious that if he was the one who had barred the window then whether it was he who hurled the statuette or no and whether that was done before or after John’s departure, he would have provided the semblance of some other entrance so that John’s presence on the scene might never be suspected.