"And the man? When did you see the man?"

"He came past a few minutes after the woman had gone towards the little
house in the garden."

"Ah! there you see, that's where you made your mistake. It is more than
likely that these two did not go to the little house, but that they went
somewhere else. Did they walk slowly and quietly?"

"Not a bit of it. They ran almost... Went past as quick as a bat in the
night."

"Then they both appeared to be in a hurry?"

"Yes indeed they did."

"Ah, ha, you see! Now when any one's in a hurry he doesn't go the
longest way round, as a rule. And it would have been the longest way
round for these two people to go from the big house to the gardener's
cottage--for the little house you saw was the gardener's cottage. There
is tall thick hedge that starts from the main building and goes right
down through the garden, quite a distance past the gardener's cottage.
The vegetable garden is on the left side of this hedge and in the middle
of the vegetable garden is the gardener's cottage. But you could have
seen the man and the woman only because they passed down the right side
of the hedge, and this would have given them a detour of fifty paces or
more to reach the gardener's house. Nov do you think that two people
who were very much in a hurry would have gone down the right side of the
hedge, to reach a place which they could have gotten to much quicker on
the left side?"

"No, that would have been a fool thing to do."

"And you are quite sure that these people were in a hurry?"

"That's dead sure. I scarcely saw them before they'd gone again."

"And you didn't see them come back?"

"No, at least I didn't pay any further attention to them. When I thought
it wouldn't be any good to look about in there I turned around and dozed
off."

"And it was during this dozing that you thought you heard the shot?"

"Yes, sir, that's right."

"And you didn't notice anything else? You didn't hear anything else."

"No, nothin' at all, there was so much noise anyway. There was a high
wind that night and the trees were rattling and creaking."

"And you didn't see anything else, anything that attracted your
attention?"

"No, nothing--" Knoll did not finish his sentence, but began another
instead. He had suddenly remembered something which had seemed to him of
no importance before. "There was a light that went out suddenly."

"Where?"

"In the side of the house that I could see from my place