“Upon a tone, A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow, And his cheek change tempestuously ... But she in these fond feelings had no share; Her sighs were not for him; to her he was Even as a brother—but no more.” After that conversation with the house-agent, the idea that he had found the clue to the Cheriton Chase mystery took root in Theodore Dalbrook’s mind. Taking as his starting-point the notion of a deadly hatred wreaking itself in an indirect revenge, there seemed no more likely figure for the _rôle_ of avenger than that of the wronged and deserted husband. The one startling improbability in this view of the case was the long interval between the husband’s appearance at Myrtle Cottage and the date of the murder; but even this difficulty Theodore was able to account for upon the hypothesis of a gradual perversion, a descent from vice to crime, as the man’s nature hardened under the corrupting influence of a profligate life, while the old festering sore grew into a malignant canker, under the lash of misery. He had seen in that great seething cauldron of London life men whose countenances bore the stamp of a degradation so profound that the most ferocious crime might seem the normal outcome of their perverted natures. He could imagine how the broken-down gentleman, steeped in drink, and embittered by the idea of wrongs which had been the natural consequence of his own misconduct, had sunk step by step upon the ladder of vice, till he had arrived at that lowest deep where the dreams of men are stained with blood and darkened by the shadow of the hangman. He could imagine such a man brooding over his wrongs for long years, nursing his jealous wrath as the one touch of manliness that survived in him—until some newspaper description of the Dalbrook and Carmichael wedding reminded him of the bitter contrast between his own lot and that of his rival, and, lashed into sudden fury, he set out upon his murderous errand, hardly caring whom he murdered so long as he could hurt the man he hated. The very fact that Mrs. Danvers’ husband had been described as a craven, made the idea of his guilt more likely. Only a coward would have chosen such a revenge; only a coward could have stretched out his hand from the darkness to kill a man who had never injured him. The crime was the crime of a coward or a madman; and this man, brutalized by drink, may have been both madman and coward. Here at least was a man closely associated with James Dalbrook’s life, and having good cause to hate him. In the darkness surrounding the murder of Godfrey Carmichael this was the first flash of light.