ave dashed into the garden, when the
policeman was at his furthest point distant, if the gates had been open as
they were now; but they had been locked, and he could not have scaled them
unobserved. Neither would it have been possible to take a header into the
river with the foreshore as described by the same witness. Yet the
murderer had either done one of these things, or the flags of the
Embankment had opened and swallowed him.

The girl stood on the very spot where the murdered man must have fallen,
and in her utter perplexity it was no longer the tragedy but the problem
which engrossed her mind. What had happened, had happened; but how could
it have happened? She raised her umbrella and peered through the rain at
a red pile of many-windowed flats; had that Argus of the hundred eyes been
sleeping without one of them open at the time? Her own eyes fell as far
as the black statue in the narrow garden, standing out in the rain, like
the greenery about its granite base, as though the blackened bronze were
polished marble. How lifelike the colossal scholar in his homely garb!
How scornful and how shrewd the fixed eternal gaze across his own old
Father Thames! It assumed another character as the girl gazed in her
turn, she seemed to intercept that stony stare, to distract it from the
river to herself, and to her fevered fancy the grim lips smiled
contemptuously on her and her quandary. He knew--_he_ knew--those grim old
eyes had seen it all, and still they stared and smiled as much as to say:
"You are looking the wrong way! Look where I am looking; that way lies
the truth you are poor fool enough to want to know!"

And Phillida turned her back towards the shiny statue, and looked over the
wet parapet, almost expecting to see something, but never dreaming of what
she actually saw. The tide, which must have been coming in that early
morning, was now going out, and between the Embankment masonry and the
river there was again a draggled ribbon of shelving foreshore, black as on
some volcanic coast; and between land and water, at a point that would
necessarily have been submerged for the last eight or nine hours, a small
object was being laid more bare by every receding wavelet. It was black
and square, perhaps the size of two large cigar-boxes side by side; and it
had one long, thin, reddish tentacle, finishing in a bulb that moved about
gently in the rain-pocked water.

Phillida felt the parapet strike cold and w