Darkness was beginning to fall when we finished tea that night and the lamps were lit when we went into the smoking room. At any moment the summons might come, and yet eight o'clock struck, and nine, and ten, and I even induced the doctor to sit up till after eleven, but still there was no sign of Bolton. And then at last I said some severe things to myself about the man, and we went to bed. Next morning was equally chilly and dismal, and after the doctor went out to visit a case, I sat over the fire resolved to stay there till Mr. Bolton came and explained himself. I stayed there all morning, but he never came, and no more did Dr. Rendall. Our dinner hour approached and passed, and at last I sat down and had my meal alone. I had just finished when I heard the front door open sharply and the doctor's step in the passage. It struck me instantly as curiously quick for him. He entered the dining room and I saw at once that something was very much the matter. "Bolton has been murdered," he said abruptly. "His body has just been found in the sea." XI AN EYE-OPENER I leapt to my feet and stared at him. "Drowned?" I gasped. "No, he was shot first with a pistol at close quarters. I've just been examining the body." "Where was it found?" "Away right at the very North end." Yesterday's episode rushed into my mind. "At the very end?" "Practically." "It wasn't by any chance as much as half a mile on this side?" He stared at me curiously and I remembered that this was certainly an odd enquiry, and also that Mr. Hobhouse was speaking very concisely. "No," he said. "Why do you ask?" I took refuge in an ultra-Hobhousian explanation of how I had been there myself a few days ago, and it had struck me as a very murderous looking place, and then I asked, "Is anything more known, doctor?" "No," he answered, and then added abruptly and with unusual energy, "This is absolutely damnable!" He walked out of the room again as he spoke, and I was left to my thoughts. I went into the smoking room but forgot to light my pipe. With my head in my hands I bent over the fire and tried in the first place to grasp this second tragedy, and then to piece things together and see some sequence in them. That Bolton had really been on the right scent now seemed highly probable, though as he made no concealment of his business, it was possible that an agency which had tried to murder me, defied all efforts to check it for months, and to all seeming had lately blown up a cruiser, might get rid of him simply on general principles. Still, the working hypothesis must be that he had got on to their track. And, oh, if he had only told me what he had discovered! But that secret had died with him, and now once more one must begin all over again.