“With this certainty before me, I ventured on my big _coup_. I was so sure, you see. I kept Joan talking in here whilst I sent Pegram to her room with orders to break open the locks of her hand-bag and dressing-case. There!--I told you that if I was wrong I would probably be dismissed the force for irregularity, as of course I had no right to do that; but if Pegram found the papers there where I felt sure they would be, we could bring the murderer to justice. I know my own sex pretty well, don’t I, Mary? I knew that Joan Duplessis had not destroyed--never would destroy--those papers.” Even as Lady Molly spoke we could hear heavy tramping outside the passage. I ran to the door, and there was met by Pegram. “She is quite dead, miss,” he said. “It was a drop of forty feet, and a stone pavement down below.” The guilty had indeed meted out her own punishment to herself! Lady d’Alboukirk sent Lady Molly a cheque for £5,000 the day the whole affair was made known to the public. I think you will say that it had been well earned. With her own dainty hands my dear lady had lifted the veil which hung over the tragedy of Fordwych Castle, and with the finding of the papers in Joan Duplessis’s dressing-bag, and the unfortunate girl’s suicide, the murder of the Indian woman was no longer a mystery. V. A DAY’S FOLLY I don’t think that anyone ever knew that the real elucidation of the extraordinary mystery known to the newspaper-reading public as the “Somersetshire Outrage” was evolved in my own dear lady’s quick, intuitive brain. As a matter of fact, to this day--as far as the public is concerned--the Somersetshire outrage never was properly explained; and it is a very usual thing for those busybodies who are so fond of criticising the police to point to that case as an instance of remarkable incompetence on the part of our detective department. A young woman named Jane Turner, a visitor at Weston-super-Mare, had been discovered one afternoon in a helpless condition, bound and gagged, and suffering from terror and inanition, in the bedroom which she occupied in a well-known apartment-house of that town. The police had been immediately sent for, and as soon as Miss Turner had recovered she gave what explanation she could of the mysterious occurrence. She was employed in one of the large drapery shops in Bristol, and was spending her annual holiday at Weston-super-Mare. Her father was the local butcher at Banwell--a village distant about four miles from Weston--and it appears that somewhere near one o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, the 3rd of September, she was busy in her bedroom putting a few things together in a handbag, preparatory to driving out to Banwell, meaning to pay her parents a week-end visit. There was a knock at her door, and a voice said, “It’s me, Jane--may I come in?” She did not recognise the voice, but somehow thought that it must be that of a friend, so she shouted, “Come in!”