The information thus supplied him was to the effect that Richard Dyson, at the time of Mr. Melray's death, was lodging with a widow of the name of Parkinson, at No. 5 Lydd Place, but that he had removed to fresh rooms about a month later. It was to No. 5 Lydd Place that Winslade now betook himself. Widow Parkinson proved to be quite willing to tell all she knew, which was not much, about her late lodger, and even to adorn her somewhat bald narrative with a little fanciful embroidery of her own invention. She considered that she had a grievance against Mr. Dyson. According to her account, he had left her, without any just cause or reason, in what she was pleased to term a very shabby way, and had taken himself and his belongings elsewhere; therefore did she feel herself at liberty to throw reticence to the winds. That from the widow's flood of talk, which at times threatened, metaphorically, to wash him off his feet, Phil contrived to eliminate the particular bit of information he was in search of goes without saying. Mr. Melray came by his death on the evening of Friday, September 18. According to his landlady, Dyson, at that time on his holidays, did not put in an appearance at his lodgings till Monday, the 21st, early on the morning of which day--that is to say, somewhere between five and six o'clock--he knocked the widow up. The account of himself which he volunteered was to the effect that he had just arrived by an early train, having lengthened out his holiday to the last possible moment, and that he was due back at the office at nine o'clock that same morning. It was the widow herself who broke to him the news of his cousin's tragical fate. "And awfully cut up about it he was surely," she went on to remark. "He had always been a laughing, careless, easy-going sort of gent, and I did not think he had so much feeling in him." Philip Winslade left No. 5 Lydd Place no wiser than he had entered it. While his inquiries of the last few days had served to bring to light many strange and hitherto unsuspected facts, they left the Loudwater Tragedy as much a mystery as before, and to Phil, in the mood in which he then was, it seemed likely to remain such for all time to come. But it sometimes happens that when everything seems at a standstill, when the way we would go is, as it were, blocked by a solid wall against which it would be folly to dash ourselves, silent forces of which we know nothing are at work, and in their own way and their own good time bring round the appointed end, which, as often as not, proves to be an end such as has not been dreamed of by us in any of our schemes of what the future might possibly bring to pass. CHAPTER XVII. "A MAN I AM, CROSS'D WITH ADVERSITY." There are certain persons connected with our narrative whom, although for some time we may seem to have lost sight of them, it is permissible to hope the reader has not quite forgotten. To them and their concerns we now turn for a little while.