"The great point about Mr. Stonebridge's evidence was that he was utterly unable to identify his assailant. He was not even sure whether he had been attacked by two men or one, since he had been blindfolded at the outset, and all that he heard was a husky voice that spoke in a whisper. He was ready to admit that he might have left the safe unlocked when he went to answer the front-door bell, and he certainly had the papers relating to Mr. Shap's case on his desk as he had been going through them earlier in the evening. Those papers, therefore, had undoubtedly been burned in the grate, and it was obvious that the theft and destruction of those papers was the motive of the assault. "After that we went from excitement to excitement. We did not get it all the same day, of course; Allan Carysfort appeared, as far as I can remember, three or four times before the local magistrates; in between times he was out on bail, this having been fixed at £1,000 in two recognisances £500 each, with an additional £500 on his own. It seems that when he was arrested he had made a statement, to which he had since unreservedly subscribed. He said that he had arrived in London from Southampton on Monday the twenty-sixth, and after seeing to some business in town, he took the eight-ten P.M. train on the twenty-eighth to Tytherton, where he arrived at nine-fifty, having dined on board. His father met him at the station with the car, but it was such a beautiful moon-lit night Sir David and himself decided that they would walk to the Grange and then sent the car home with a message to Lady Carysfort that they would be home at about eleven o'clock. "Carysfort had been asked whether it was not strange that after being absent from home for so long, he should have elected to put off seeing his mother till a much later hour. "'Not at all,' he replied. 'My father wished to put me _au fait_ of certain family matters before I actually saw Lady Carysfort. These matters,' he added emphatically in reply to questions put to him by the magistrate, 'had nothing whatever to do with financial business, least of all were they in any relation to Mr. Shap and his affairs. Sir David and I,' he went on calmly, 'walked about for a while, and then Sir David remembered that he wished to see a friend at the County Club. He went in there, but I preferred to take another turn out of doors, as I had not had a taste of English country air for nearly two years.' "Asked how long he had walked about Tytherton waiting for Sir David, Carysfort thought about half an hour, and when questioned as to the direction he had taken, he said he really couldn't remember.