feet and lit a cigarette as he began to pace his room, backwards and forwards along the well-marked path across his carpet. The solicitor sat and watched him—watched his impassive face—watched the quick, nervous fingers as they clicked the rings upon them backwards and forwards—watched the cigarette smoked to the end and thrown away as another was lighted from it. At[68] last the barrister came to a pause in front of his fireplace.

[68]

“Baxter, the murder has proved an insoluble mystery, depending upon an unknown motive. You know everything about Sir John’s affairs, except what those papers may disclose. You cannot find a basis for a motive in what you know. The odds are the clue is hidden in those papers.”

“I agree with you. I should say that is probable.”

“But no man contemplates his own murder without taking steps to avert it, if that be possible. Sir John took no steps at all. No man would sit down to be murdered, and content himself with providing evidence to catch his murderer afterwards. Sir John never created the trust for that purpose. You can rest assured this is not the eventuality to provide for which that trust was created. It exists for some[69] widely different purpose. And there’s another thing, Baxter. Sir John says a disclosure would be a breach of faith. That would involve a third person. It is that third person on whose behalf Sir John has gone to all that trouble. It wasn’t himself he was bothering about. So long as he was alive he could have dealt with the thing himself, or he might have been waiting for the knowledge that it never would arise. That was why he did not constitute the trust during his own lifetime, but preferred rather to run the risk of public curiosity about the clause in his will.”

[69]

“What should you have done, Tempest?”

“I should have destroyed the papers, I think; but there is one awful risk. Suppose they do contain the clue to the murder, and through the lack of that clue an innocent person gets hanged?”

[70]“Well, as a matter of fact we burnt them yesterday.”

[70]

“Then you elected to run that risk?”

“Tempest, it isn’t fair to a lawyer to tell him only half the tale. Wrapped round the papers was another slip. As nearly as I remember, the words written on it were as follows:—

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