“Very good, sir. According to my information the following was the state of affairs which had obtained prior to my being sent down here. The late Mr. Averill had a sum of money amounting to several thousand pounds stored in a safe in his bedroom. This was given in evidence at the inquest on the victims of the Starvel tragedy. It was not then mentioned, but it was the fact—always according to my information—that that money had consisted largely of twenty-pound notes. Mr. Averill was in the habit of sending to the bank the various cheques, dividends and so forth by which he received his income. By his instructions these were cashed and the money was returned to Starvel in the form of twenty-pound notes, which the old gentleman placed with the others in his safe. All these notes were believed to have been destroyed in the fire. But it so happened that the numbers of the last consignment—ten notes, for £200—were taken by the bank teller before the notes were sent out to Starvel, and these notes were reported to the bank’s headquarters as being destroyed. When, therefore, some three weeks after the tragedy one of them turned up in London, questions were asked. Reasons were given for believing that this particular note had been in Mr. Averill’s safe at Starvel on the night of the fire, so the suggestion at once arose that the fire was not an accident, but a deliberate attempt to hide a crime of murder and burglary. I was sent down to investigate the affair, and I may say that I found out who had passed the note and satisfied myself beyond question that he had received it in a legitimate manner, and that all his actions were perfectly correct and in order. It followed, therefore, that the finding of the note did not in reality support any theory of crime such as had been put forward.” While French was speaking the proverbial pin could have been heard, had any one tried the experiment of dropping it in the courthouse. He had, to put it mildly, the ear of his audience. Every one listened, literally, with bated breath. Though it was vaguely known that he was a detective working on the Starvel case, the story that he himself had circulated had been generally accepted; that he was employed on behalf of certain insurance companies to ascertain the cause of the outbreak. To find that the pleasant-spoken, easygoing stranger whom the townspeople had almost begun to accept as one of themselves, was none other than a full-fledged inspector from Scotland Yard, investigating what had been at first suspected to be a triple murder of an unusually terrible and sinister kind, was a discovery so thrilling as completely to absorb the attention of all.