therefore, by securing any clue and hiding it from the police, I was assuredly acting in her interest.

I had already managed to secure the ring surreptitiously from the dead man’s finger before the body had been removed from the spot where we had discovered it, and as neither Warr nor the others had noticed it, I held it as a probable clue which I intended should be my secret alone.

“He was evidently struck with a long thin knife,” remarked Pink, a muscular, clean-shaven man who was extremely popular in the district, a keen sportsman and something of an epicure. He had probed the wound and ascertained that its direction had been only too accurate. “Whoever did it,” he declared, “knew exactly where to strike. I daresay he fell without a cry. The knife was very sharp, too,” he went on, examining one of the black horn buttons of the young man’s jacket-cuff. “You see it grazed this as he raised his arm to ward off the blow and shaved off a tiny piece, just as a razor might. The coroner will want to see this. I’ll get Newman over, and we’ll make a proper post-mortem in the morning.”

Pink was a clever surgeon who masked his capabilities behind an easy-going good-humour. His poor patients were often convulsed by his amusing remarks, while at the houses of the county people he was always a welcome guest on account of his inexhaustible fund of droll stories, his shrewd wit, and his outspoken appreciation of a good dinner. His odd ways were the idiosyncrasies of genius, for without doubt he was as expert a surgeon as there was outside Harley Street, and I myself had heard praise of him from the mouths of certain London men with big “names.”

The manner in which he examined the unfortunate young man who had so suddenly fallen a victim of an assassin showed that he was intensely interested. He grunted once or twice and sniffed suspiciously, and with some gusto took a pinch of snuff from his heavy silver box. Then, having carefully examined the man’s right hand, he turned to me again, saying, as he pointed to it—

“That’s strange, Woodhouse, isn’t it?”

“What?” I inquired, detecting nothing.

“Can’t you see. His hand is clenched. He grasped something just at the moment when he was struck.”

“Well?”

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