“Mr. Cylmer stated that he merely glanced at the photograph. Lord Abbotsford had many women friends whom he did not know; but that he remembered distinctly its being there. Of the diamonds missing, no trace can be found, though they had only been purchased that day as a gift for the betrothed wife of the dead man. But that such infamous crimes can be committed with impunity in the house of a well-known nobleman, in the very heart of London, is not to be thought possible, and every means will be brought to bear to bring the perpetrator to justice. No motive can be found for the murder, the robbery excepted. His estates go to a distant cousin, at present a midshipman on foreign service in the Royal Navy. The deepest of sympathy is extended throughout society to the lady whose engagement to Lord Abbotsford was announced only the day before his death.” “A pack of fools!” said the reader slowly. “And the man who wrote this is the worst. They may hunt through every street in London and never find a thread to help them. If Lord Abbotsford had had a clever man servant”--he shrugged his lean shoulders--“but he would have country bumpkins from his estate to wait on him, and no others!” He sat in a brown study for a long half-hour, and then roused himself to eat his cold breakfast. He had not eaten much lately; his waitress, when she cleared away, was glad his appetite had improved. He lived alone in one of the curious rookeries known to the frequenters of the Inns of Court. He was anything but a briefless barrister, yet his briefs were usually of a sort another man would have looked at twice. Not Marcus Wray--the world owed him a living, and he must get it, somehow. It did not concern him that the people who went up and down his staircase--after dark--were not the cream of society. Contrary to his habits, he spent his morning in utter idleness, smoking; his lean, round shoulders more humped than usual, his ugly, clean-shaven face wrinkled repulsively. There was money to be got out of the Abbotsford tragedy, yet just how would not come to him. His thick, red lips pressed hard on his cigar, and the lean, knotted hand that lay on his knee never ceased a curiously light movement, as if he were driving in a nail, carefully, very carefully. Suddenly the tapping ceased as the man’s face relaxed. “I think I have it,” he said to himself. “Anyhow, I will go out and--make a call!” He folded up his paper and put it safely in his overcoat pocket when he was ready to start. He might want it--it had interested him. It had interested two other people in London--Ismay Trelane and her mother. Till they read it they had hardly eaten or slept; the days had passed somehow, that was all. If Mr. Cylmer’s evidence had been given early in the inquiry they might have suffered less, but it had been kept to the very last. Mrs. Trelane, pale and staring, was the first to speak when the morning paper was read. “We’re all right,” she said thickly.