"That he might be. His manner was so confused, himself so agitated when I first spoke. His hands trembled, his lips grew white, He strove to turn it off, saying I had startled him, but I felt a very queer doubt arising in my mind. His narrative had to be drawn from him; it was anything but clear, and full of contradictions. 'Why do you come to me about this?' he asked: 'have you heard anything?' 'I only come to ask you for information,' was my answer: 'Mrs. John Tanerton wants the matter looked into. If her husband is not guilty, he ought to be cleared in the face of the world.' 'Nobody thinks he was guilty,' retorted Sir Dace in a shrill tone of annoyance. 'Nobody was guilty: Pym must have fallen and injured himself.' I came away from the interview, as I tell you, with my doubts very unpleasantly stirred," resumed Chandler; "and it caused me to be more earnest in looking after odds and ends of evidence in London than I otherwise might have been." "Did you pick up any?" "Ay, I did. I turned the people at the Marylebone lodgings inside out, so to say; I found out a Mrs. Ball, where Verena Fontaine had hidden herself; and I quite haunted Dame Richenough's in Ship Street, Tower Hill. There I met with Mark Ferrar. A piece of good fortune, for he told me something that----" "What was it?" gasped the Squire, eagerly. "Why this--and a most important piece of evidence it is. That night, not many minutes before the fatal accident must have occurred, Ferrar saw Sir Dace Fontaine in Ship Street, watching Pym's room. He was standing in an entry on the opposite side of the street, gazing across at Pym's. This, you perceive, disproves one fact testified to--that Sir Dace spent that evening shut up in his library at home. Instead of that he was absolutely down on the spot." The Squire rubbed his face like a helpless man. "Why could not Ferrar have said so at the time?" he asked. "Ferrar attached no importance to it; he thought Sir Dace was but looking over to see whether his daughter was at Pym's. But Ferrar had no opportunity of giving testimony: he sailed away the next morning in the ship. Nothing could exceed his astonishment when I told him in London that Captain Tanerton lay under the suspicion. He has taken Crabb on his way to Worcester to support this testimony if needful, and to impart it privately to Tanerton." "Well, it all seems a hopeless puzzle to me," returned the pater. "Why on earth did not Jack speak out more freely, and say he was not guilty?"