“What a servant, what a friend you have always been, Fairlie!” continued the old lady in the strained, high-pitched voice of intense feeling, looking at him with wide eyes which glistened with tears. “In the happy years before I married I remember you so well; in the long, dark years afterwards you have been, oh, like a shield, standing by ready to help always. And now!” Her gaze faltered and wandered from the bowed, uneasy figure until it met Humblethorne’s, and she went on, “You do not get servants like that nowadays; he has been with me over forty years.” Her eyes left Humblethorne and rested on Evelyn. “How clever you have been, Evelyn!” she exclaimed, as if a new thought had entered her weary, restless brain. “I do not understand at all how you made it out. Very clever—but quite wrong!” “Wrong!” cried Evelyn, astounded. “Yes, dear,” said Lady Penterton. “Fairlie didn’t kill Sir Roger,” she paused for the fraction of a second as she looked at him: “I did!” On all but one of her audience this announcement, delivered with such rapidity that none could forecast the direction in which her apparently haphazard remarks were tending, came with the effect of a thunderclap. “You!” they cried in a single voice of stupefaction—but on Fairlie the effect was very different. He started forward in the attempt to check her speech, but was too late; then, seizing her hand, he pressed it to his lips as he cried in tones of acutest distress, “Oh, my lady, my lady, why did you speak? I would have died, willingly I would.” “I know; I believe you,” she answered, bending over him with a rare tenderness; “but I could not allow that.” “I don’t understand,” cried Evelyn, finding her voice at last. “You killed him, Aunt Eleanor, you? But——” “I will tell you all about it,” said Lady Penterton, still looking at Fairlie and paying very little attention to anybody else. “I never meant not to, only it was so terrible and got harder instead of easier. It is very simple; it was quite an accident. Oh, I did not mean to; did you think I did, Fairlie?” “I didn’t know, my lady. I couldn’t see very clearly; it was too dark.” “Where were you?” “Just inside the dining-room, my lady.” “Oh, I see: that explains it.” She leant back and closed her eyes. “I think,” said Humblethorne, after waiting several moments for her to go on, “that we must hear everything now. I never thought Fairlie was speaking the truth before.” “But I was,” returned Fairlie, rising and facing the inspector; “up to a point, that is. Everything I told you was as it happened up to the time Sir Roger was left alone in the hall.” “What happened then? The truth, this time.”