“I didn’t much cotton to the house, myself, for a solution. It was reasonable to suppose, of course, that, during his tenancy of the place, he hadn’t overlooked its best facilities for concealment. But, then, where _he_ could find a way, others could too, and the reputation of the farm promised a pretty searching inquiry into its holes and corners. No, I thought, if our gentleman’s to be unearthed at all, it will be from somewheres characteristic of his genius, and the least likely to be considered by the ordinary. Probability pointed to the house for that: therefore I made it my business to look outside. “Now, I don’t know if you may recall, gentlemen, a rather queer thing--and that was the odd laugh the lady give in answer to our Italian friend’s remark that she’d been too precipitate? She had--she admitted it indirectly. She’d always been looking, the inference was, for this solution to the long grudge she’d bore against him, and, when at last it come, it come too late. Why? By God, gentlemen, the answer took me in a flash. It was because she herself had already anticipated the law by killing him. “Once, in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. Yet, if it was true, it only made the puzzle deeper. For where could she have hid him, none the less? and why had she chosen this particular time more than another for the deed? The plain answer to that second seemed because he must have put himself suddenly at her mercy, in a way he’d never done before, and the temptation had proved too strong for her. It was then for the first time that the well occurred to me. Could she have pushed him in unexpected when he was gone to draw water? “I had observed the thing, of course, often enough before. Its size and depth and the machinery about it was only too conspicuous to draw my serious notice. But now I went to a closer examination--and, by the Lord, gentlemen, what do you think I found caught among the cogs? Why, a finger-stall. That was something, at least, for on the day we first saw her, Mrs D. was wearing such a thing.