apon was to be found, and we saw no sign of a camera either, though this
boy tells me your uncle had his with him when he went out. That's more or
less conclusive in itself. But there was a doctor on the spot before we
left, and I heard him say the shot couldn't have been fired at very close
quarters, and that death must have been instantaneous. So it's no more a
suicide than the case in Park Lane yesterday or the one in Hyde Park last
week; there's evidently some maniac prowling about at dawn, and shooting
down the first person he sees and then vanishing into thin air as maniacs
seem to have a knack of doing more effectually than sane men. But the
less we jump to conclusions about him--or anybody else--the better."

The girl was grateful for the covert sympathy of the last remark, and yet
it startled her as an index of what must have passed already between
father and son. It was a new humiliation that this big bluff man should
know as much as the boy whom she had learnt to look upon as a comrade in
calamity. Yet she could not expect it to be otherwise.

"What must you think!" she cried, and her great eyes filled and fell
again. "Oh! what must you think?"

"It's no good thinking," he rejoined, with almost a jovial kindness.
"We're all three on the edge of a mystery; we must see each other through
before we think. Not that I've had time to hear everything yet, but I own
I can't make head or tail of what I have heard. I'm not sure that I want
to. I like a man's secrets to die with him; it's enough for me to have my
boy back again, and to know that you stood by him as you did. It's our
turn to stand by you, my dear! He says it wasn't your fault he didn't
come away long ago; and it shan't be mine if you stay another hour alone
in this haunted house. You've got to come straight back with us to our
hotel."

They happened to be all three standing in the big back room, a haunted
chamber if there was one in the house. With his battle-pictures on the
walls, his tin of tobacco on the chimney-piece, and the scent of latakia
rising from the carpet, the whole room remained redolent of the murdered
man; and the window still open, the two chairs near it as they had been
overnight, and the lamp lying in fragments on the path outside, brought
the last scene back to the boy's mind in full and vivid detail. Yet the
present one was in itself more desolate and depressing than any in which
Dr. Baumgartner had figured. It migh