od day, Galloway," he exclaimed, as that officer came forward to
greet him. "I hope you've got everything ready."

"Everything's ready, Mr. Edgehill. Do you intend to commence before
lunch?"

"Of course I do. Are you aware that it is war-time? How many witnesses
have you?"

"Five, sir. Their statements have all been taken."

"Then I shall go straight through--it seems a simple case--merely a
matter of form, from what I have heard of it. I have another inquest at
Downside at four o'clock. Where's the body? Upstairs? Doctor"--this to
the tall thin man who had sat beside him in the run-about--"will you go
upstairs with Queensmead and make your examination? Where's the jury?
Pendy"--this to the young man with the typewriter and attache case--"get
everything ready and swear in the jury. Galloway will show you the room.
What's that? Oh, that's quite all right"--this in reply to some murmured
apology on the part of Superintendent Galloway for the mental incapacity
of the jury--"we ought to be glad to get juries at all--in war-time."

Colwyn had feared that the result of the inquest was a foregone
conclusion the moment he saw the coroner alighting from his motor-car
outside the inn. Ten minutes later, when the little man had commenced
his investigations, he realised that the proceedings were merely a
formal compliance with the law, and in no sense of the word an inquiry.

Mr. Edgehill, the coroner, was one of those people who seized upon the
war as a pretext for the exercise of their natural proclivity to
interfere in other people's affairs. He took the opportunity that every
inquest gave him to lecture the British public on their duties and
responsibilities in war-time. The body on which he was sitting formed
his text, the jury was his congregation, and the newspaper reporters the
vehicles by which his admonitions were conveyed to the nation. Mr.
Edgehill saw a shirker in every suicide, national improvidence in a
corpse with empty pockets, and had even been able to discover a
declining war _morale_ in death by misadventure. He thanked God for air
raids and food queues because they brought the war home to civilians,
and he was never tired of asserting that he lived on half the voluntary
rations scale, did harder work, felt ten years younger, and a hundred
times more virtuous, in consequence.

If he did not actually insert the last clause his look implied a
superior virtue to his fellow creatures, and was meekly accepted