"It looks like it, but I'm not quite as sure as you are," he said laconically. Brown stared, but made no comment. A verdict was a verdict. His young colleague had the inexperience and the vanity of youth, and thought he was more clever than other people, perhaps! But on one thing the young constable had made up his mind, and that was that Miles, the bibulous caretaker, had not told the truth when in the witness-box. He came to this conclusion from his demeanour. Miles swore that he had no knowledge of the dead man, but the constable believed this to be a lie. And with the tame ending of the Coroner's inquest, the mystery of No. 10 Cathcart Square ceased to hold the public interest. Plenty of other things came on to attract their attention. CHAPTER I |In the year before the Great War, when to all appearance there was not a cloud upon the horizon, when only a few statesmen felt "profoundly uneasy," the secret of that uneasiness being carefully locked away in their own breasts, and hidden from the general public--in that year of 1913, in the month of March, the Twenty-fifth Lancers were quartered at the town of Blankfield, in Yorkshire. The Twenty-fifth was a crack regiment. Most of the officers were members of the aristocracy, a few of the plutocracy, that portion of the plutocracy which on account of its wealth had been adopted into a superior world by marriage with its aristocratic daughters. They were a fine set of clean-minded, healthy living, sporting young fellows. They rode to hounds, they played polo when there was any going, they shot over the coverts of their friends, they made love to all the pretty girls they came across in a gallant and desultory fashion, loving and riding away. It cannot be said that they took their professional duties in too serious a fashion. But they were brave as lions, and when the time came to prove their mettle, none of their relatives had cause to blush for their record. The memories of most of them were enshrined deeply in the hearts of wailing mothers and weeping sweethearts, when the great holocaust came. Foremost amongst this band of gay spirits and resolute sportsmen was a certain Captain Murchison, "Hughie," as he was always called by his intimates. "Hughie" was not a pure aristocrat. His father, a man of fabulous wealth, was the head of the great brewing firm of Murchison, Delaroyd & Co., the fourth in succession, for the big brewery had been founded over a hundred years ago. It is supposed, in the case of self-made men, that it requires three generations to make a gentleman. Anyway, the present Sir Hugh had won his spurs by the fact of belonging to the fourth. And he had further firmly established his position by marrying Lady Gertrude Marchmont, a daughter of the Earl of Mounthaven. The Marchmonts had blue blood in profusion, they ere one of the oldest families in the Kingdom, only just being beaten by such superior people as the Howards, the Talbots, and the Nevilles.