"The executive of the institute consisted, in addition to the three persons I have named, of its president, General Sir Arkwright Jones, who, it seems, took little if any interest in the concern. It seemed as if, by giving it the prestige of his name, he had done all that he intended for the furtherance of the institute's welfare. Then there were the governors, a number of amiable local gentlemen and ladies who played tennis all day and attended innumerable tea-parties, and knew as much about administering a big concern as a terrier does of rabbit-rearing. "In the midst of this official supineness, the murder of the young matron, followed immediately by the arrest of the secretary, had come as a bombshell, and now wise heads began to wag and ominous murmurs became current that for some time past there had been something very wrong in the management of the Woodforde Institute. Whilst, at the call of various august personages, money was pouring in from the benevolent public, the commissariat was being conducted on parsimonious lines that were a positive scandal. The boys were shockingly underfed, and the staff of servants was constantly being changed because girls would not remain on what they called a starvation régime. "Then again, no proper accounts had been kept since the inception of the Institute five years ago; entries were spasmodic, irregular and unreliable; books were never audited; no one, apparently, had the slightest idea of profit and loss or of balances; no one knew from week to week where the salaries and wages were coming from, or from quarter to quarter if there would be funds enough to meet rates and taxes; no one, in fact, appeared to know anything about the affairs of the Institute, least of all the secretary himself, who had often remarked quite jocularly that he had never in all his life known anything about book-keeping, and that his appointment by the governors rested upon his agreeable personality rather than upon his financial and administrative ability. "As you see, the Captain's position was, in consequence of this, a very serious one; it became still more so when presently two or three ominous facts came to light. To begin with, it seemed that he could give absolutely no account of himself during the greater part of the night of May fifth. He had left the Institute at about seven o'clock; he told the headmaster then that he was going for a walk which seemed strange as it was pouring with rain. On the other hand the landlady at the room where he lodged told the police that when she herself went to bed at eleven o'clock, the Captain had not come in: she hadn't seen him since morning, when he went to his work, and at what time he eventually came home she couldn't say.