"You leave things in the hands of Mabel, my son. She'll manage the affair all right. But Marr----" "Damn him! I should like to give him a thrashing." "I don't see upon what grounds you could, Cannington. It is true that he suppressed the fact that he had a grown-up daughter, but that is not a crime, and the suppression was due only to vanity. I daresay he intended to tell the truth if Mabel had accepted him." "I daresay," muttered the boy, still wrathful, "but I wouldn't give the little beast the benefit of the doubt. I can't exactly call him to account either legally or socially, I suppose, but if he dares to speak to me again----" Cannington's fist clenched itself in his deerskin glove. "I don't think you will set eyes on him for many a long day," I said carelessly; "he'll stop in the States and marry." "What does his daughter say?" "She is very much cut up at the way in which he has behaved. Fancy his having all that money--one hundred thousand pounds--and keeping his daughter down to the simple necessaries of life." "Perhaps he hasn't the money at all," said Cannington abruptly. "He must have," I insisted; "look at the motor car he drove in: and then his rooms are beautifully furnished." "He might have got all that by swindling." "In that case, you certainly are justified in thrashing him, since he obtained an introduction to Lady Denham under false pretences. But I don't think Mr. Monk has the nerve to swindle." Cannington laughed grimly. I had never seen the easy-going boy so angry. "I think he has the nerve for anything, after what he has done--even for murder, Vance." I started, remembering my belief that Gertrude was shielding her father. "I don't understand." "He might have murdered Anne Caldershaw." "Oh, nonsense. Mr. Monk wasn't even in the neighborhood." "Mr. Walter Monk, under his real name, wasn't: but Mr. Wentworth Marr was!" "Cannington?" "Don't you remember how I told you that Marr called on that mess shortly before we arrived. He was stopping at the Lion Hotel in Murchester, and went off without seeing me again." "Then you think that he went to Mootley to see Anne Caldershaw and murdered her straight away?" "I can't be sure that he murdered her," said Cannington doubtfully, "but you can see for yourself that the man is game for anything. According to what you tell me, Mrs. Caldershaw was murdered for the sake of that glass eye, which contains the clue to a fortune. Monk or Marr, or whatever you like to call the beast, might have murdered the woman and stolen the eye and have got the money. I daresay," added Cannington, with a grim laugh, "he is really wealthy." "I can't believe it," said I, desperately hoping against hope, for it was unpleasant to think that Gertrude might be the daughter of a criminal. "Long before the Mootley murder, he was courting your sister as a rich man."