within listening to Robert Turold. Barrant told
himself that Mrs. Pendleton's suspicion of Thalassa rested on nothing more
substantial than feminine prejudice, an unreasoning impulse of dislike
which would leave few men alive if it always carried capital punishment in
its train.

The substitution of Sisily for Thalassa provided a convincing motive for
murder. The overheard revelation of her mother's shame and her own
precarious condition in the world when she might reasonably have been
counting on becoming an heiress of note, were sufficient to account for
the nocturnal return and an effort to entreat justice or compel
silence--the alternatives depended on the type of girl. From what Mrs.
Pendleton had told him of Sisily and her love for her mother--poor Mrs.
Pendleton had insisted, all unwittingly, very strongly on that--Barrant
had pictured her as a brooding yet passionate type of girl who might have
committed the murder in a sudden frenzy of determination to prevent her
father making public the unhappy secret of her mother's life. That was an
act by no means inconsistent with the temperament of a strongwilled and
lonely girl, whose stormy passions had been wrought to the breaking-point
by disclosures made on the very day that her loved mother had been buried
in a nameless grave. There was, additionally, the motive of self-interest,
awakened to the lamentable fact that she had no claim on her father beyond
what generosity might dictate. In short, Barrant believed the motive for
the murder to be a mixed one, as human motives generally are. At that
stage of his reasoning he did not ask himself whether worldly greed was
likely to enter into the composition of a girl like Sisily.

This reconstruction of the crime pointed to an accomplice, and that
accomplice must have been the man-servant. Nobody but Thalassa could have
let the girl into the house; and he could have dropped the key in the room
after the door was broken open. That theory not only presupposed strong
devotion on Thalassa's part for a girl he had known from childhood, which
was a theory reasonable of belief, but it also suggested that he bore a
deep grudge against his master on his own account, sufficient to cause him
to refrain from doing anything to prevent the accomplishment of the
murder, and to risk his own skin afterwards to shield the girl from the
consequences. This aspect of the case struck Barrant as very strange and
deep, because it failed to accou