Alec sat down heavily in the nearest chair. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed limply. “But what on earth makes you think that? I thought you were so convinced that it was murder.” “So I was,” Roger said, leaning against the dressing table. “That’s what makes it all the more extraordinary, because I really am very seldom wrong. I say it in all modesty, but the fact is indisputable. By all the laws of average, Stanworth ought to have been murdered. It really is most inexplicable.” “But how do you know he wasn’t?” Alec demanded. “What’s happened since I saw you last to make you alter your mind like this?” “The simple fact that Mrs. Plant received a note from old Stanworth, saying that he was going to kill himself for private reasons of his own or something.” “Oh!” “I can tell you, it knocked me upside down for the minute. Anything more unexpected I couldn’t have imagined. And the trouble is that I don’t see how we can possibly get round it. A note like that is a very different matter to that statement.” “You know, I’m not sure that I’m altogether surprised that something like this has turned up,” Alec said slowly. “I was never quite so convinced by the murder idea as you were. After all, when you come to look at all the facts of the case, although they certainly seemed to be consistent with murder, were no less consistent with suicide, weren’t they?” “So it appears,” Roger said regretfully. “It was simply that you’d got the notion of murder into your head—more picturesque, I suppose—and everything had to be construed to fit it, eh?” “I suppose so.” “In fact,” Alec concluded wisely, “it was an _idée fixe_, and everything else was sacrificed to it. Isn’t that right?” “Alexander, you put me to shame,” Roger murmured. “Well, anyhow, that shows you what comes of muddling in other people’s affairs,” Alec pointed out severely. “And it’s lucky you hit on the truth before you made a still bigger idiot of yourself.” “I deserve it all, I know,” Roger remarked contritely to his hair-brush. It was Alec’s turn to be complacent now, and he was taking full advantage of it. As he lay back leisurely in his chair and smoked away placidly, he presented a perfect picture of “I told you so!” Roger contemplated him in rueful silence. “And yet——!” he murmured tentatively, after a few moments’ silence. Alec waved an admonitory pipe. “Now, then!” he said warningly.