mmit burglary, and had murdered
Mrs. Heredith to escape identification. The isolation of the moat-house,
the presence of guests with valuable jewels, the time chosen for the
crime, and the scream of the victim, tended to confirm him in this
belief. Caldew's chance discovery about Hazel Rath, and the subsequent
events which arrayed such strong circumstantial evidence against her,
brought the other side of the system uppermost and set Merrington
seeking for a motive which would accord with the presumption of the
girl's guilt. Having found that motive, he was satisfied that he had
done his duty, and he thought very little more about the case.

It was his tenacious adhesion to conservative methods which caused him
to blunder in his treatment of Colwyn's information about the missing
necklace. He rarely acted on impulse. His habitual distrust of humanity
was deep, and to it was wedded a wariness which was the heritage of long
experience. But his obstinate conviction of Hazel Rath's guilt led him
to make a false move in his effort to square the loss of the necklace
with the evidence against the girl. His own poor opinion of human nature
hindered him from seeing, as Colwyn had seen, any inconsequence between
such widely different motives as maddened love and theft; that was one
of those subtle differentiations of human psychology in which his
coarse-grained temperament was at fault. It is probable that
Merrington's dislike of private detectives contributed to obscure his
judgment at a critical moment. He was unable to see that Colwyn, by
reason of his intellect and practical capacity, stood in a class apart
and alone.

In his contemplation of the case Merrington's thoughts turned to Colwyn,
and he wondered in what direction the private detective's investigations
into the case had progressed--if they had progressed at all--since he
had seen him last. In a chastened mood, he reflected that Colwyn had not
only given him a warning which was annoyingly different from other
advice in being well worth following, but had acted generously in
informing him of the missing necklace when he might have kept the
discovery to himself, in order to score a point over Scotland Yard and
place one of the Yard's most distinguished officials in an awkward
position.

With a belated but unconscious recognition of an intelligence which far
surpassed his own, Merrington felt that it would be worth while to have
another talk with Colwyn, in the hope o