voice, as he stood gazing, awed, upon the still features. “’E be a middlin’ likely sort of gent, for sure.”

“I know just as much about him as you do, Joe. As I told you this morning—I never ask people about themselves, and he didn’t tell me anything. No doubt he would have done so this morning, poor chap, but—there he is. Well, get away now and fetch the doctor and the police, and the sooner we get all the bother over and done with the better.”

Mervyn went out, and superintended the harnessing of the pony, and saw his old retainer start. It would take the latter well over the hour to jog along the hilly road, between Heath Hover and Clancehurst.

“Straight on and straight back, Joe,” was his parting injunction. “You don’t want to wet your whistle at any pubs this journey you know. The business is too important. And keep your tongue in your head about it, too. The only people you’ve got to wag it to are the doctor and the inspector. To any one else might make things unpleasant to you. See?”

Having, as he thought, effectually frightened his ancient servitor into discretion, and duly seen him start, Mervyn went back to the house, but did not enter. Instead, he took his way up to the sluice and stood gazing out over the ice-bound pond. There was nothing to be done until the representatives of medicine and the law should arrive, and meanwhile he felt a sort of disinclination to enter the house. But for its rather thick coating of snow he would have put on his skates and amused himself upon the said ice, cutting a few figures. Then he remembered he had had no breakfast, and suddenly felt the want of it.

Accordingly he descended the path, and entering began to get out the requisite materials. He was accustomed largely to doing for himself, so in a trice he had brewed his tea in the kitchen and got out other things needed. But some of the said other things were in the living-room, left there from the night before. He did not care to breakfast there with the dead man lying on the couch in the same room.

The latter seemed unusually, supernaturally still. He glanced at the couch. It was just as he had left it. There was nothing particularly repellant in the dead man’s aspect. On the whole it was rather peaceful—still, he preferred to have his breakfast somewhere else. And then, while collecting what he required, his thoughts went again to the thing he had deposited within the vase on the mantelpiece.

This he now extracted. Had there 

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