“No, the question of identity was carefully gone into. Lord Dangerfield happened to be wintering at Cannes that year, and he heard of his son-in-law’s death in time to go over and identify the body before it was coffined. You know how quickly burial follows death in that part of the world, and there would have been no possibility of the widow getting over from Ajaccio before the funeral. We had Lord Dangerfield’s declaration that the body he saw at Nice was the body of Colonel Strangway, and we paid the £3,000 on that evidence. We have never had any reason to suspect error or foul play.” CHAPTER XIII. “Thou takest not away, O Death? Thou strikest—absence perisheth, Indifference is no more; The future brightens on our sight; For on the past hath fallen a light That tempts us to adore.” While Juanita clung with feverish intensity to the hope of discovering her husband’s murderer Lord Cheriton seemed to be gradually resigning himself to the idea that the crime would go to swell the long list of undiscovered murders which he could recall within his own experience of life—crimes which had kept society expectant and on the alert for a month, and which had stimulated the police to unwonted exertions, finally to fade into oblivion, or to be occasionally cited as an example of the mysteriousness of human history. He had offered a large reward, he had brought all his own trained intelligence to bear upon the subject; he had thought and brooded upon it by day and by night; and the result had been nil. A hand had been stretched out of the darkness to slay an unoffending young man, in whose life his daughter’s happiness had been bound up. That was the whole history of the murder. A shot heard in the night, a bullet fired out of the darkness with fatal aim. Not one indication, not one suggestive fact had been discovered since the night of the murder. “It is hopeless,” said Lord Cheriton, talking over the calamity with Mr. Scarsdale, the Vicar of Cheriton and Testwick, adjoining parishes; “the crime and the motive of the crime are alike inscrutable. If one could imagine a reason for the act it might be easier to get upon the track of the murderer; but there is no reason that I can conceive for such a deed. It has been suggested to me that Sir Godfrey might have had a secret enemy—that his life might not have been as spotless as we think——” “I will answer for it that he was never guilty of a dishonourable action, that he provoked no man’s hatred by any unworthy act,” interrupted the Vicar warmly. He had been curate at Milbrook before he got the Cheriton living, and had lived for two years at the Priory while he prepared Godfrey Carmichael for Eton, so he claimed the right to vouch for the honour of the dead. “There never was a whiter soul in mortal clay,” said the Vicar.