St. Luke’s summer still held; the comparative silence of man’s Sabbath conspired with the autumn stillness of nature—the sunshine quiet that is disturbed no longer by clicking grasshoppers, nor yet by cawing rooks—to hush the countryside. Far below him he could see the golfers at their orisons, fulfilling, between hope and fear, the daily cycle of their existence. Gordon and Carmichael were at the third tee now; he could have waved to them. Carmichael always made too much business about addressing the ball. Over there was the neglected house, itself radiating the silence of a forgotten past. All else was drowsing; he alone, Mordaunt Reeves, strode on relentlessly in pursuit of crime. He threw himself down at full length on the bank, just beneath the line. “Now,” he said, talking to himself out loud, “you are in the fast train from London to Binver, Mordaunt Reeves. It has stopped only once at a station, Weighford; probably oftener outside stations, because it is a foggy day and the trains get through slowly, with little fog-signals going off at intervals. If you fired a pistol at a fellow-passenger, it would probably be mistaken for a fog-signal by the people in the next carriage. Is that worth thinking of, I wonder? No, there must have been traces of a wound if a wound had been made, and it would have come out at the inquest. So you can’t get much further that way, my dear. “There is somebody in the train you badly want to murder. You want to murder him to-day, because his bankruptcy has just been declared, and if he is found dead people will think it is suicide. You have warned him to look out for himself—I wonder why you did that? But of course you must have done it on Monday so as to give him a chance to save himself. . . . No, that won’t do, because you didn’t know anything about his bankruptcy before Tuesday. . . . But the message reached him on Tuesday morning. That is to say, you have a motive for killing him which is probably quite unconnected with his bankruptcy, which is not known about at present—certainly kind Mr. Davenant does not know about it. He is not coming by this train, he is waiting till the 3.47. You sent this man a message on Monday, containing a cipher which depended on a book which was in his possession, which you knew was in his possession—did you, perhaps, give him that book? It will be a nuisance to you later on, when it is found, and you will want to steal it.