What secret knowledge could be possessed by that smart, handsome girl before me? That her suspicions were in the right direction I felt confident, yet if the dead woman had been removed and hidden by the assassin it must have been after the discovery made by me. The fellow must have actually dared to return to the spot and carry off the victim. Yet if he had actually done that, why did he allow the corpse of the Italian to remain and await discovery? He might perhaps have been disturbed and compelled to make good his escape. "If the woman was really removed the assassin must surely have had some assistance," I pointed out. "He could not have carried the body very far unaided." She agreed with me, but expressed a belief that the double crime had been committed alone and unaided. "Have you any idea as to the motive?" I asked her, eager to hear her reply. "Well," she answered hesitatingly, "if the woman has fallen a victim, the motive will become plain; but if not, then the matter must remain a complete mystery." "You tell me, Miss Muriel, that you suspect the truth, and yet you deny all knowledge of the murdered man!" I exclaimed in a tone of slight reproach. "Until we have cleared up the mystery of the woman I can say nothing," was her answer. "I can only tell you, Mr. Gregg, that if what I suspect is true, then the affair will be found to be one of the strangest, most startling and most ingenious plots ever devised by one man against the life of another." "Then a man is the assassin, you think?" I exclaimed quickly. "I believe so. But even of that I am not at all sure. We must first find the woman." She seemed so positive that a woman had also fallen beneath that deadly _misericordia_ that I fell to wondering whether she, like myself, had discovered the body, and was therefore certain that a second crime had been committed. But I did not seek to question her further, lest her own suspicions might become aroused. My own policy was to remain silent and to wait. The woman sitting before me was herself a mystery. Then, when the rain had abated, I told Davis to send her trap a little way up the high-road, so that my aunt and uncle should not see her departing; and after helping her on with her loose driving-coat, we left by one of the servants' entrances, and I saw her into her high dog-cart and stood bareheaded in the muddy high-road as she drove away into the gloom. * * * * * Rannoch Wood was already in its gold-brown glory of autumn, and as I stood with Muriel Leithcourt on the edge of it, near the spot where Olinto Santini had fallen, the morning sun was shining in a cloudless sky.