"Yes, I've just left her. She still says she knows nothing. It's pitiful! A simple, sincere, religious old soul, who has seen trouble of her own apparently. I don't think for a moment she would tell an untruth, yet it is easy to see that in her heart she believes her daughter to be guilty." "Guilty?" "Yes, but there's somebody guiltier than the girl--the man." Stowell was silent; but he felt his face twitching. "That's why I am so anxious that you should sit on this case if you can, Victor, not leave it to Deemster Taubman. Old Judges often refuse to investigate collateral facts, and so the woman is punished and the man goes free." "They can't do otherwise, dear. They can't try the man." "Not if he has been a party to the crime?" "A party...." "Yes! I'm satisfied that in this case he is, too." The girl might be guilty, but she could not have done all she was charged with. It was physically impossible. Somebody must have helped her. And that somebody (the old mother having to be ruled out) must be the man who had it to his interest to save his miserable character by concealing the fact that the girl had given birth to a child at all. Stowell had as much as he could do to cover his embarrassment. He lowered his voice and said, "That's a blind alley. I've read the Depositions. I'm sure it is, dear." "Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't," said Fenella. "I intend to follow it up anyway." "How?" said Stowell, but rather with his mouth than his voice. "I'm already on the track of something." "On the track...." "Yes. It seems that somebody has been telling the mother that on the night when the girl left home (shut out by her abominable step-father, you know) she went to the house of a Mrs. Quayle, living on the south shore in Ramsey." Stowell's heart thumped and his lips quivered. "Mrs. Quayle?" "Why, that must be the housekeeper at your chambers, dear," said Janet, busy with her teacups. "You know her? .... But then everybody knows everybody in the Isle of Man," said Fenella. With a sense of duplicity, Stowell found himself saying, "Well?" "Well, I'm going to see this Mrs. Quayle on my way home to Government House. She'll be able to tell me how long the girl stayed with her, who took her away, and where she went to." Stowell dropped his head, feeling that he wanted to escape from the room, and Fenella (indignantly, passionately, vehemently) went on to denounce the guilty man. "Of course the girl is shielding him. A woman always does that. I should do it myself if I were in the same position. But oh, how I should like to find him out! Even if he has taken no part in the actual crime, how I should like to punish him--to expose him! You must sit on this case--you really must, dear."