As he read on, his head swam with the cumulative evidence of that deliberately planned and cruelly executed yet brutal murder. The details of the crime gave him a sickening sense of loathing and incredulity. Impossible that his own son could have schemed and carried out so vile an attack upon a helpless person, who had once been his nearest and dearest companion. And yet, the account in the paper gave him no alternative but to believe it. Nevitt and Guy Waring had been inseparable friends. They had dined together, supped together, played duets in their own rooms, gone out to the same parties, belonged to the same club, in all things been closer than even the two twin brothers. Some quarrel seemed to have arisen about a matter of speculations in which both had suffered. They separated at once--separated in anger. Nevitt went down to Devonshire by himself for his holiday. Then Waring followed him, without any pretence at concealment; inquired for him at the village inn with expressions of deadly hate; tracked him to a lonely place in the adjacent wood; choked him, apparently with some form of garotte or twisted rope--for the injuries seemed greater than even the most powerful man could possibly inflict with the hands alone; and hid the body of his murdered friend at last in a mossy dell by the bank of the streamlet. Nor was that all; for with callous effrontery he had returned to the inn, still inquiring after his victim; and had gone off next morning early with a lie on his lips, pretending even then to nurse his undying wrath and to be bent on following up with coarse threats of revenge his stark and silent enemy. So far the Times. But to Colonel Kelmscott, reading in between the lines as he went, there was more in it than even that. He saw, though dimly, some hint of a motive. For it was at Mambury that all these things had taken place; and it was at Mambury that the secret of Guy Waring's descent lay buried, as he thought, in the parish registers. What it all meant, Colonel Kelmscott couldn't indeed wholly understand; but many things he knew which the writer of the account in the Times knew not. He knew that Nevitt was a clerk in the bank where he himself kept his account, and to which he had given orders to pay in the six thousand to Cyril's credit, at Cyril's bankers. He knew, therefore, that Nevitt might thus have been led to suspect the real truth of the case as to the two so-called Warings. He knew that Cyril had just received the six thousand. Trying to put these facts together and understand their meaning he utterly failed; but this much at least was clear to him, he thought--the reason for the murder was something connected with a search for the entry of his own clandestine marriage.