Inspector Bannister leaned over the table and held him lightly by the fore-arm. “Think very carefully,” he said quietly, “was it by any chance the Crown Prince of Clorania? Was that the name?” Davidson sat back in open-mouthed astonishment. “’Pon my solemn soul,” he exclaimed with a look of complete mystification, “you’ve holed in one. You’re sure some little laddie—what?” Chapter XIII Re-enter Mr. X It seemed to “Pinkie” Kerr that her entire world had come tumbling hopelessly about her ears. That she had been relentlessly caught in the mesh of misery. The news that had awaited her upon her arrival at Tranfield had produced in her a species of mental paralysis. Her brain was numbed. The telegram that had summoned her from her Devonshire home and holiday had not told her all. Bannister had deliberately tempered the blow to her by partly preparing her for the inevitable shock. She sat in the dining-room of “Rest Harrow” with the brilliant July sunshine pouring through the windows and tried hard to realise that she would never see her beloved Miss Sheila again in this transitory world of hopes, doubts and fears. And the mental paralysis that had so completely taken hold of her mercifully prevented her from experiencing this bitter realisation to its full poignancy. To her, representative as she was of her class, a telegram was always regarded as the harbinger of evil and when it had reached her on the evening of the previous day, she had felt instinctively and assuredly that this particular telegram would prove no exception to the sinister rule. She had obeyed its startling summons almost mechanically—dumbly as it were—making no articulate complaint against the bludgeoning of Fate and accepting the scroll of punishment with a bowed head and the better part of a contrite heart. As she sat in the comfortable chair in the room at “Rest Harrow” and faced Chief-Inspector Bannister, supported left and right by Anthony Bathurst and Sergeant Ross, her sixty-odd years weighed heavily upon her but she tried hard to collect the best qualities of her intelligence for the sake of her “bairn” that had been so foully struck down and so ruthlessly taken from her. The only real consciousness that she possessed was clamouring for vengeance. She was half Devonian and half Scots and for the moment the Scots strain had struggled for the mastery and after the habit of its kind had succeeded in obtaining it. One thought was being registered clearly in her sorely-afflicted brain and one thought only. She might be the means of bringing Miss Sheila’s murderer to the penalty of Justice. An idea here or a suggestion there might well prove to be a shaft of enlightenment to the skilled brains that were waiting to question her. She sat there, fighting hard against the chaos of her mind. There was not only Miss Sheila’s memory for her to serve! There was also Colonel Dan’s! Colonel Dan to whom she had ministered faithfully for more years than she cared to remember.