At the inquest it was shown that Mr. Melray's death had resulted from a blow from some blunt instrument just above the left ear. The only hypothesis which could be deduced from the scanty evidence elicited at the inquiry was to the effect that while on his way to Mr. Arbour's house, Mr. Melray had unexpectedly encountered some person, or persons with whom he was in some way connected by transactions of either a business or a private nature, and that, in company with the same, he had gone back to his office, admittance to which he would obtain by means of his pass-key, after which he had lighted the gas and opened the safe. What had happened after that, beyond the fact that Mr. Melray had come by his death by foul play, there was not the slightest evidence to show. The body had not been robbed; neither, as the head-clerk's after investigation proved, had the contents of the safe been tampered with. As far as was known, the dead man had not an enemy in the world. Where, then, was the motive for the crime? By whom had it been perpetrated? Days and weeks went on without bringing an answer to either one question or the other. Within a few hours of the discovery of the murder Mr. Robert Melray, the dead man's brother and partner, was telegraphed for, and as, just then, he happened to be no further away than London, he was promptly on the spot. He it was who, a little later, and after all the efforts of Scotland Yard to unravel the mystery had proved unavailing, offered a reward of 500_l_. in connection with the affair, which, however, still remained unclaimed. So much having been stated by way of prelusion, it becomes needful, for a due understanding of the way in which Philip Winslade came to be mixed up with the Loudwater Tragedy, that our narrative should revert to a date several months anterior to that of Fanny Sudlow's letter to her lover. THE NARRATIVE CHAPTER I. ON THE EDGE OF A SECRET. Probably there was no happier man in all England than Philip Winslade on the particular afternoon on which we make his acquaintance. At this time he had just turned his twenty-eighth birthday. He was a thin, active, keen-faced gentlemanly young fellow, with an aquiline nose and very bright and piercing steel-gray eyes. In colour his hair was a light brown, and it was perhaps owing to the fact that he was clean shaven, except for an inch of whisker on either cheek, that he looked younger than his years; that he did look so was, however, undisputable.