The meeting between Juanita and her father was more painful to him than to her. She hung upon his neck in feverish excitement, imploring him to avenge her husband. “You can do it,” she urged; “you who are so clever must know how to bring the murderer’s guilt home to him. You will find him, will you not, father? He cannot have gone very far. He cannot have got out of the country yet. Think, it was only Friday. I was a happy woman upon Friday; only think of that—happy—sitting by Godfrey’s side in the phaeton, driving through the sunset, and thinking how beautiful the world was and what a privilege it was to live. I had no more foreboding than the skylark had singing above our heads. And in less than an hour after midnight my darling was dead. Oh, God, how sudden! I cannot even remember his last words. He kissed me as he left me at my bedroom door—kissed me and said something. I cannot remember what it was; but I can hear the sound of his voice still—I shall hear it all my life.” Lord Cheriton let her ramble on. He had, alas, so little to say to her, such sorry comfort to offer. Only words, mere words—which must needs sound idle and hollow in the ear of grief, frame his consolatory speeches with what eloquence he might. He could do nothing for her, since he could not give her back her dead. This wild cry for vengeance shocked him from those young lips; yet it was natural perhaps. He too would give much to see the assassin suffer; he too felt that the deck and the gallows would be too trivial a punishment for that accursed deed. He had looked upon the marble face of him who was to have been the second Baron Cheriton—looked upon it in its placid repose, and had sworn within himself to do all that ingenuity could do to avenge that cruel murder. “He could not have had an enemy,” he told himself, “unless it was some wretch who hated him for being happy and beloved.” He had a long talk with Mr. Luke Churton, the London detective, who had exhausted all his means without arriving at any satisfactory result. “I confess, my Lord, that I am altogether at a standstill,” said Mr. Churton, when he had related all that he had done since his arrival on the scene early on Saturday afternoon. “The utmost information I have been able to obtain leaves me without one definite idea. There is no one in the neighbourhood open to suspicion, so far as I can make out; for I am sure your Lordship will agree with me that your butler’s notion of a poacher resenting your treatment by the murder of your son-in-law is much too thin. One cannot accept such a notion as that for a moment,” said Mr. Churton, shaking his head. “No, that is an untenable idea, no doubt.”