way across a broad
vale to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of
violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well ordered, so eloquent
of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the house,
and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot, white road,
stood the gardener's toolshed, by which the body had been found, lying
tumbled against the wooden wall, Trent walked past the gate of the drive
and along the road until he was opposite this shed. Some forty yards
further along the road turned sharply away from the house, to run
between thick plantations; and just before the turn the grounds of the
house ended, with a small white gate at the angle of the boundary hedge.
He approached the gate, which was plainly for the use of gardeners and
the service of the establishment. It swung easily on its hinges, and he
passed slowly up a path that led towards the back of the house, between
the outer hedge and a tall wall of rhododendrons. Through a gap in this
wall a track led him to the little neatly built erection of wood, which
stood among trees that faced a corner of the front. The body had lain on
the side away from the house; a servant, he thought, looking out of
the nearer windows in the earlier hours of the day before, might have
glanced unseeing at the hut, as she wondered what it could be like to be
as rich as the master.

He examined the place carefully and ransacked the hut within, but he
could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers,
he searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
fruitless.

It was interrupted by the sound--the first he had heard from the
house--of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
the house in the direction of the great gate.

At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's
face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their
tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other,
Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe,
strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it; in
his handsome, regular