ve for
the chaplain's communication now appeared. Mrs. Zebedee was asked if
anything unpleasant had occurred between Mr. Deluc and herself.

Yes. He had caught her alone on the stairs at the lodging-house; had
presumed to make love to her; and had carried the insult still farther
by attempting to kiss her. She had slapped his face, and had declared
that her husband should know of it, if his misconduct was repeated. He
was in a furious rage at having his face slapped; and he said to her:
"Madam, you may live to regret this."

After consultation, and at the request of our Inspector, it was decided
to keep Mr. Deluc in ignorance of Mrs. Zebedee's statement for the
present. When the witnesses were recalled, he gave the same evidence
which he had already given to the Inspector--and he was then asked if he
knew anything of the knife. He looked at it without any guilty signs
in his face, and swore that he had never seen it until that moment. The
resumed inquiry ended, and still nothing had been discovered.

But we kept an eye on Mr. Deluc. Our next effort was to try if we could
associate him with the purchase of the knife.

Here again (there really did seem to be a sort of fatality in this
case) we reached no useful result. It was easy enough to find out the
wholesale cutlers, who had manufactured the knife at Sheffield, by the
mark on the blade. But they made tens of thousands of such knives,
and disposed of them to retail dealers all over Great Britain--to say
nothing of foreign parts. As to finding out the person who had engraved
the imperfect inscription (without knowing where, or by whom, the knife
had been purchased) we might as well have looked for the proverbial
needle in the bundle of hay. Our last resource was to have the knife
photographed, with the inscribed side uppermost, and to send copies to
every police-station in the kingdom.

At the same time we reckoned up Mr. Deluc--I mean that we made
investigations into his past life--on the chance that he and the
murdered man might have known each other, and might have had a quarrel,
or a rivalry about a woman, on some former occasion. No such discovery
rewarded us.

We found Deluc to have led a dissipated life, and to have mixed with
very bad company. But he had kept out of reach of the law. A man may be
a profligate vagabond; may insult a lady; may say threatening things to
her, in the first stinging sensation of having his face slapped--but it
doesn't follow f