dear guv’nor.”

And the young man sighed.

“Perhaps Edgson knows something?” the solicitor suggested.

“He knows nothing. He only suspects that there is a lady concerned in it, for my father, before his death, referred to ‘her’.”

“Your respected father was my client and friend through many years,” said Mr Kellaway. “As far as I know, he had no secrets from me.”

Raife looked him straight in the face for a few moments without speaking. Like all undergraduates he had no great liking for lawyers.

“Look here, Kellaway,” he said slowly. “Are you speaking the truth?”

“The absolute truth,” was the other’s grave reply.

“Then you know of no secret of my father’s. None—eh?”

“Ah, that is quite a different question,” the solicitor said. “During the many years I have acted for your late father I have been entrusted with many of his secrets—secrets of his private affairs and suchlike matters with which a man naturally trusts his lawyer. But there was nothing out of the common concerning any of them.”

“Nothing concerning any lady?”

“Nothing—I assure you.”

“Then what do you surmise regarding ‘the trap,’ about which my father left me this inexplicable message?”

“Edgson may be romancing,” the lawyer suggested. “In every case of a sudden and tragic death, the servant, male or female, always has some curious theory concerning the affair, some gossip or some scandal concerning their employer.”

“Edgson has been in our family ever since he was a lad. He’s not romancing,” replied Raife dryly.

Mr Kellaway was a hard, level-headed, pessimistic person, who judged all men as law-breakers and criminals. He was one of those smug, old-fashioned Bedford Row solicitors, who had a dozen peers as clients, who transacted only family business, and whose firm was an eminently respectable one.

“I have always thought Edgson a most reliable servant,” he admitted, crossing to the safe, the key of which Raife had handed to him.

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