“Mr. Blick,” answered Mr. Fransemmery in his gravest accents, “your profession being what it is, I can speak freely to you. And I will speak freely to Mrs. Braxfield, things having developed as they have. What I am going to say has only been known to me for a few hours; I think it may be known to the Markenmores’ solicitor by now—it may be—and possibly to Harry Markenmore. But I’ll tell you and Mrs. Braxfield what it is, now—it may save some trouble. Mind, this is nothing that I can personally vouch for!—it is only something that I have heard. And it is this—I may tell you that I have spent the whole day searching for Baron von Eckhardstein; I have been all up and down in the lonelier parts of the woods and in some of the Down valleys. About noon I was in that very out-of-the-way valley on the other side of one hill, called Grayling Bottom—a wild, solitary place, Mr. Blick. There is just one human habitation in it, tenanted by a woman whom Mrs. Braxfield no doubt knows—Margaret Hilson. It was very chilly in that valley—a sunless, cold place always—and I asked Margaret Hilson to let me sit by her cottage fire while I ate my lunch, which I had carried out with me. This woman is a close, reserved person—the sort, I should say, who could keep secrets for ever if she chose—but she talked to me with some freedom about the present events and situation. And finding that I was a lawyer, she talked still more freely, and in the end—knowing, as she said, that things would have to come out—she said she would tell me something that she had kept entirely to herself for four years. Briefly, it was this: Margaret Hilson says that at just about the time of Guy Markenmore’s disappearance from these parts, there also disappeared a girl named Myra Halliwell, a very pretty girl, one of two daughters of a small farmer in this neighbourhood, whose sister, Daphne Halliwell, she said, went out to India as lady’s-maid to Mrs. Tretheroe, came back with her, and is now in her service at the Dower House. This Myra, says Margaret Hilson, was considered to be engaged to be married to a man named Roper—James Roper—a woodman, still, I believe, employed on the Markenmore estate. But, as I have said, she, according to Margaret Hilson, completely disappeared at the same time that Guy Markenmore left the Court. That,” observed Mr. Fransemmery, pausing in his narration and glancing significantly at the detective, “is an important matter to keep in mind—in view of what follows.”