Yes, there was an alternative course. If he were once assured of the identity of the assassin, it might be in his power to lay hands upon him, and to place him under such circumstances of control in the future as would insure Juanita’s safety, and render any further crime impossible. If the man were mad, as Theodore thought more than likely, he might be quietly got into an asylum. If he were still master of his actions he might be got abroad, to the remotest colony in the Antipodes. The knowledge of his crime would be a hold over him, a lever which would remove him to the uttermost ends of the earth, if need were. This would be an illegal compromise, no doubt—unjustifiable in the eye of the law,—but if it insured Juanita’s safety, and saved her father’s character, the compromise was worth making. It was, indeed, the only way by which her security and her father’s good name could be provided for. To arrive at this result he had to find the man who appeared in Mr. Adkins’s office about four and twenty years ago, and of whose subsequent existence he, Theodore, had no knowledge. “I must begin at the other end,” he told himself. “If that man was the murderer, he must have been seen in the neighbourhood. It is not possible that he could have come to the place, and watched for his opportunity, and got clear off after the deed was done without being seen by human eyes.” And yet there remained the fact that the local policeman and a London detective had both failed in obtaining the faintest trace of a suspicious-looking stranger, or indeed of any stranger, male or female, who had been observed in the neighbourhood of Cheriton before or after the murder; there remained the fact that a large reward had been offered without resulting in one scrap of information bearing upon the subject. How could he hope, in the face of these facts, to trace the movements of a man whose personal appearance was unknown to him, and who had come and gone like a shadow? “I can but try, and I can but fail,” he told himself. “Knowing what I know now, I cannot remain inactive.” It may be that he had caught something of the fiery eagerness which consumed Juanita, that in his ardent desire to be worthy of her regard, to waste his life in her service, he had become, as it were, inoculated with the spirit of his mistress, and hoped as she hoped, and thought as she thought. With the beginning of the Long Vacation he went to Dorchester, but this time not alone. He took his friend Cuthbert Ramsay with him, as a visitor to the grave old house, in the grave old town.