“This is all I know of her. And now tell me why you are so anxious to learn her history—you who can never have seen her face, except in the picture at Cheriton. I dressed her for that picture and sat by while it was painted.” “I will tell you the motive of my curiosity,” answered Theodore. “You have treated me so frankly that I feel I must not withhold my confidence from you. I know that I can rely upon your discretion.” “I can talk, as you have just heard,” said Miss Newton; “but I can be silent as the grave, when I like.” “You must have read something about the murder at Cheriton last July.” “I read a great deal about it. I took a morbid interest in the case, knowing the house so well in every cranny and corner. I could picture the scene as vividly as if I had seen the murdered man lying there. A most inexplicable murder, apparently motiveless.” “Apparently motiveless. That fact has so preyed upon the widow’s mind that she has imagined a motive. She has a strange fancy that one of the Strangways must have been the author of the crime. She has brooded over their images till her whole mind has become possessed with the idea of one of that banished race, garnering his wrath for long years, until at last the hour came for a bloody revenge, and then striking a death-blow out of the dark—striking his fatal blow and vanishing from the sight of men, as if a phantom arm had been stretched out of the night to deal that blow. She has asked me to help her in discovering the murderer, and I am pledged to do my utmost towards that end. I am the more anxious to do so as I tremble for the consequences if she should be allowed to brood long upon this morbid fancy about the Strangways. I think, however, that with your help I have now laid that ghost. I have traced the two brothers to their graves; and I suppose we may accept the statement of the man you met at Folkestone as sufficient evidence of Mrs. Darcy’s death; especially as it seems to fit in with the account of the then Vicar of Cheriton, who met her in Boulogne in the summer of ’64 looking very ill and much aged.” “It was in the spring of ’65 I met that man at Folkestone. I could find the exact date in my diary if you wished to be very precise about it, for it is one of my old-maidish ways to be very regular in keeping my diary. Poor Evelyn! To think that any one should be mad enough to suspect her of being capable of murder—or Fred or Reginald. They had the Strangway temper, all three of them; and a fiery temper it was when it was roused, a temper that led to family quarrels and all sorts of unhappiness; but murder is a different kind of thing.” “That is the question,” said Theodore, gravely. “Is there such a wide gulf between the temper that makes family quarrels, sets father against son, and brother against brother, and the temper that pulls a trigger or uses a bowie-knife? I thought they were one and the same thing in actual quality, and that the result was dependent upon circumstances.”