“That is my discovery,” said Theodore, pointing to the pistols. “I stopped short in my journey to Scotland Yard when I found that case upon the table here. I want to secure Juanita and her son from the possibilities of an insatiable hatred—but I don’t want to bring trouble—or disgrace—upon you, if I can help it. You have always been good to me, Lord Cheriton. You have regarded the claims of kindred. It would be base in me if I were to forget that you are of my own blood—that you have a right to my allegiance. Tell me, for God’s sake, what I am to do. Trust me, if you can. I know so much already that it will be wisest and best for you to let me know all—so that I may help you to find the murderer, and to avoid any reopening of old wounds.” “I doubt if you or any one else can help me, Theodore,” said Lord Cheriton wearily, looking straight before him through the open lattice and across the little flower-garden where the roses were still in their plenitude of colour and perfume. “I doubt if all my worldly experience will enable me to help myself even. There is a pass to which a man may come in his life—not wholly by his own fault—at which his case seems hopeless. He sees himself suddenly brought to a dead stop, deep in the mire of an impassable road, and with the words ‘No thoroughfare’ staring him in the face. I have come to just that point.” “Oh, but there is always an issue from every difficulty for a man of courage and resolution,” said Theodore. “I know you are not a man to be easily broken down by Fate. I am half in the light and half in the dark. It must have been the owner of that pistol who killed Godfrey Carmichael—but how came the case and the fellow-pistol into Mrs. Porter’s possession? Was she that man’s accomplice? And who was he, and what was he, that she should be associated with him?” “You believe that it was a man who fired that pistol?” “Most assuredly. I believe it was the man whose wife lived for many years at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Grove; the man who called upon a house-agent at Camberwell to make inquiries about his wife, and who called himself by the name she bore in the neighbourhood—the name of Danvers. Danvers may have been only an alias for Darcy, and in that case the man who called upon the agent was the husband of Evelyn Strangway, and the woman who lived for so many years in the seclusion of Myrtle Cottage was old Squire Strangway’s only daughter, and Captain Darcy’s runaway wife.” “And you think Tom Darcy murdered my son-in-law?” asked Lord Cheriton, with a ghastly smile. “I do.” “And what do you suppose to have been the motive of that murder?” “Revenge—revenge upon the man who tempted his wife away from him.”