ite side
of the fireplace and prepared to talk. Paul heaped on coals with a
lavish hand, little as he could afford this extravagance, as the night
was cold and he guessed that Hurd had much to say. So, on the whole,
they had a very comfortable and interesting conversation.

"I suppose you are pleased to see me?" asked Hurd, puffing meditatively
at his briar.

Paul nodded. "Very glad," he answered, "that is, if you have done
anything about Mrs. Krill?"

"Well," drawled the detective, smiling, "I have been investigating that
murder case."

"Lady Rachel Sandal's?" said Beecot, eagerly. "Is it really murder?"

"I think so, though some folks think it suicide. Curious you should have
stumbled across that young lord," went on Hurd, musingly, "and more
curious still that he should have been in the room with Mrs. Krill
without recollecting the name. There was a great fuss made about it at
the time."

"Oh, I can understand Lord George," said Beecot, promptly. "The murder,
if it is one, took place before he was born, and as there seems to have
been some scandal in the matter, the family hushed it up. This young
fellow probably gathered scraps of information from old servants, but
from what he said to me in the cab, I think he knows very little."

"Quite enough to put me on the track of Lemuel Krill's reason for
leaving Christchurch."

"Is that the reason?"

"Yes. Twenty-three years ago he left Christchurch at the very time Lady
Rachel was murdered in his public-house. Then he disappeared for a time,
and turned up a year later in Gwynne Street with a young wife whom he
had married in the meantime."

"Sylvia's mother?"

"Exactly. And Miss Norman was born a year later. She's nearly
twenty-one, isn't she?"

"Yes. She will be twenty-one in three months."

Hurd nodded gravely. "The time corresponds," said he. "As the crime was
committed twenty-three years back and Lord George is only twenty, I can
understand how he knows so little about it. But didn't he connect Mrs.
Krill with the man who died in Gwynne Street?"

"No. She explained that. The name of Krill appeared only a few times in
the papers, and was principally set forth with the portrait, in the
hand-bills. I shouldn't think Lord George was the kind of young man to
bother about hand-bills."

"All the same, he might have heard talk at his club. Everyone isn't so
stupid."

"No. But, at all events, he did not seem to connect Mrs. Krill with the
dead man. And ev