only the slightest
fluttering at the corners of his mouth.

As his activities enlarged, Malcolm Sage's fame had increased, and
he was overwhelmed with requests for assistance. Clients bore down
upon him from all parts of the country; some even crossing the
Channel, whilst from America and the Colonies came a flood of
letters giving long, rambling details of mysteries, murders and
disappearances, all of which he was expected to solve.

Those who wrote, however, were as nothing to those who called. They
arrived in various stages of excitement and agitation, only to be
met by Miss Gladys Norman with a stereotyped smile and the equally
stereotyped information that Mr. Malcolm Sage saw no one except by
appointment, which was never made until the nature of the would-be
client's business had been stated in writing.

The Surrey cattle-maiming affair, and the consequent publicity it
gave to the name of Malcolm Sage, had resulted in something like a
siege of the Bureau's offices.

"I told you so," said Lady Dene gaily to her husband, and he had
nodded his head in entire agreement.

Malcolm Sage's success was largely due to the very quality that had
rendered him a failure as a civil servant, the elasticity of his
mind.

He approached each problem entirely unprejudiced, weighed the
evidence, and followed the course it indicated, prepared at any
moment to retrace his steps, should they lead to a cul-de-sac.

He admitted the importance of the Roman judicial interrogation, "cui
bono?" (whom benefits it?); yet he realised that there was always
the danger of confusing the pathological with the criminal.

"The obvious is the correct solution of most mysteries," he had once
remarked to Sir James Walton; but there is always the possibility of
exception.

The Surrey cattle-maiming mystery had been a case in point. Even
more so was the affair that came to be known as "The Gylston
Slander." In this case Malcolm Sage arrived at the truth by a
refusal to accept what, on the face of it, appeared to be the
obvious solution.

It was through Roger Freynes, the eminent K.C., that he first became
interested in the series of anonymous letters that had created
considerable scandal in the little village of Gylston.

Tucked away in the north-west corner of Hampshire, Gylston was a
village of some eight hundred inhabitants. The vicar, the Rev. John
Crayne, had held the living for some twenty years. Aided by his wife
and daughter, Muriel, a