ible that she had. She certainly had the best
reasons of any one, as far as he knew, for committing it.

The evidence of Mr. Manley about the time at which he heard Lord
Loudwater snore was of the first importance. But how to get it out of
him? Mr. Flexen had a strong feeling that not only would Mr. Manley
afford no help to bring the murderer of Lord Loudwater to justice, but,
that owing to the vein of Quixotry in his nature, he was capable of
helping the murderer to escape. That he could do. He had only to declare
that he heard Lord Loudwater snore at twelve o'clock to break down the
case against any one of the four persons between whom the crime obviously
lay. Mr. Flexen had a shrewd suspicion that Mr. Manley would fail to
remember at what time he had last heard Lord Loudwater's snores till the
police had set about securing the conviction of one of the possible
murderers. Then, when the case of the police against the murderer was
revealed, he would come forward and break it down. He had decided that
Mr. Manley was a sentimentalist, and he knew well the difficulty of
dealing with sentimentalists. Moreover, Mr. Manley was animated by a
grudge against the murdered man. Mr. Flexen could quite conceive that he
might presently be regarding perjury as a duty; he had had experience of
the queer way in which the mind of the sentimentalist works.

It appeared to him that everything depended on his finding the
mysterious woman.

That afternoon Elizabeth Twitcher determined to go to see James
Hutchings. She had not seen him since their interview on the night of the
murder. In the ordinary course she would not have dreamt of going to him
after that interview, for it had left them on such a footing that further
advances, repentant advances, must come from him. But there were pressing
reasons why she should not wait for him to make the advances which he
would in ordinary circumstances have made after his sulkiness had abated.
All her fellow-servants and all the villagers, who were not members of
the Hutchings family, were assured that he had murdered Lord Loudwater.
Three of the maids, who were jealous of her greater prettiness, had with
ill-dissembled spitefulness congratulated her on having dismissed him
before the murder; her mother had also congratulated her on that fact.
Elizabeth Twitcher was the last girl in the world to desert a man in
misfortune, and, considering James Hutchings' temper, she could only
consider the murder