his
planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a
poor woman's pocket, Mr. Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you
know ... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you.
I could kill a person myself in some circumstances. But Mr. Marlowe was
incapable of doing it. I don't care what the provocation might be. He
had a temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature
with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely
anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never
put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at
times.... He really loathed and hated physical violence. He was a very
strange man in some ways, Mr. Trent. He gave one a feeling that he might
do unexpected things--do you know that feeling one has about some
people?... What part he really played in the events of that night I have
never been able to guess. But nobody who knew anything about him could
possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life." Again the
movement of her head expressed finality, and she leaned back in the
sofa, calmly regarding him.

"Then," said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, "we
are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought
worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he
might still conceivably have killed in self-defense; or he might have
done so by accident."

The lady nodded. "Of course I thought of those two explanations when I
read your manuscript."

"And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases
the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to
make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of
deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the
law, if anything went wrong with them."

"Yes," she said wearily, "I thought over all that until my head ached.
And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow
screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light
in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear
about was that Mr. Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told what
you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was. I
promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet
again; and now I've kept my promise."

Trent, his chin resting on his ha