“I’m afraid if I were to meet my godson in the arms of a strange nurse I should not know him,” he said, deprecatingly, after he had kissed the rosebud mouth, “but, please God, the time will come when he and I will be firm friends. As soon as he is old enough to decline _mensa_ I shall feel that we can converse upon a common footing, and when he goes to Eton I shall renew my youth every time I run down to waste an hour in the playing fields watching him at cricket, or to drive him to the ‘White Hart.’” Although he put on an air of cheerfulness in his leave-taking, he left the Priory with a sense of deepest anxiety; and it was almost a relief to him when he received a letter from Lady Jane a week afterwards. “I could not get over the uneasy feeling which your suggestion awakened,” she wrote, “so I am going to carry off mother and child to Switzerland the day after to-morrow. Interlaken and Grindelwald are delightful at this season. We shall return to Dorsetshire as soon as the tourists begin to invade our retreat, and I trust in God that some discovery may be made in the meantime, so that all our minds may be more at ease.” CHAPTER XXI. “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.” That ghastly idea mooted by Cuthbert Ramsay—the idea of an unsatisfied hatred still hovering like a bird of prey over the heads of Juanita and her child, ready to make its deadly swoop in the hour that should see her most helpless and unprotected—gave a new impetus to Theodore’s mind, and he applied himself again to the apparently hopeless endeavour to find the motive of the murder and the person of the murderer. As an initial step he invited Mr. Churton to dine with him at his chambers, entertained that gentleman with a well-chosen little dinner sent in from a famous tavern in the Strand, and a bottle of unexceptionable port after dinner; and by this innocent means got the detective into an expansive frame of mind, and induced him to discuss the Cheriton murder in all its bearings. The result of the long evening’s talk differed in hardly any point from the opinion which Mr. Churton had formulated at Cheriton. The motive of the murder must be looked for in some past wrong, or fancied wrong, inflicted upon the murderer. And again Mr. Churton returned to his point that there was a woman at the bottom of it. “Do you mean that a woman fired the shot?”