“I don’t think so; I take no interest in those things.” “Well, I’m damned! Let me tell you, you’ve had the amazing experience of seeing solved before your eyes one of the greatest murder puzzles of all time.” He went to a shelf and took down a book. “Here it is, a classic of the _Great Trials_ series. I’ve read it a dozen times, and puzzled and wondered. Now, partly for my own amusement--for I love talking murder--and partly to show you what an absolutely marvellous and mysterious person you are, I’ll tell you the story. “Richard Eagles was at Univ. with me. He was a flabby animal of no marked attractions, and lots too much money. He was an orphan, and at twenty-one came into the Barton Estate, amongst a number of other very pleasant things. “He was by no means a genius where men were concerned, and about women he was a complete ass. He wasn’t what we mean by a womaniser exactly, but he had a mania for being seen about with female celebrities of the lighter sort. Most of them spent his money avidly, but he had a streak of caution inherited from his very able father, and, as he was a bore into the bargain, he was forced to change his partner pretty frequently. These ladies pretended to like him at first, but made him realise that ‘that little more and what worlds away’ was only to be obtained _via_ a Registrar’s Office; but Richard was not the marrying sort; the streak of caution saved him, and he disappointed them one by one. It used to be quite a joke in the old days, for these so jealously guarded charms were often surprisingly surrendered by their fair owners, and even I remember being present at a capitulation or two. Acquit me of boasting. Like you, Robert, I have reached the age when one is visited neither by pangs of conscience nor gusts of vanity by the remembrance of successful indiscretion; at an age, in other words, when emotions of that _genre_ are recollected with tranquility. “Eventually, probably inevitably, however, he got caught, and one ill-omened evening he was introduced to Miss Patty Golden at the Regent Night Club, where she was the professional dancer. “All that could be known about this young person’s antecedents and mode of life came out at the trial. Both her mother and father, who had kept a small shop at Luton, were dead. Apparently they had been completely commonplace individuals, but by some Mendelian miracle they had produced between them one of the most fascinating human animals on whom it has been my, or anybody else’s, luck to cast an eye. I tell you frankly that, if she had gone for me, I would have gone to the devil for her myself. “Her hair was a most shining auburn, her eyes large, violet sirens, her figure delicious--at least by the standards of those times, and they are still mine. But hosts of damsels can display such charms more or less; what they don’t possess is the amazing vitality, sparkle and ‘devil’ which Patty had more than any woman I have ever known.