sciousness
of guilt, and the hope of escaping the consequences through a loop-hole
of the law?

Colwyn, however, was unable to accept this line of argument as
conclusive, so he tried to put the case out of his mind. But the
unsolved points of the mystery--the points that he himself had
discovered during his visit to the inn--kept returning to his mind at
all sorts of odd times, in the night, and during his walks. And each
recurrence was accompanied by the consciousness that he had not done his
best in the case, but had allowed the silence of the accused man to
influence his judgment and slacken his efforts to unravel the clues he
had originally discovered. Thus he travelled back to his starting-point,
that the conviction of Penreath had not solved the mystery of the murder
of Roger Glenthorpe.

The hotel and its guests bored him. The season was over, and the few
people who remained were elderly and commonplace, prone to overeating,
and to falling asleep round the lounge fire after dinner. The only
topics of conversation were the weather, the war, and food. Sometimes
the elderly clergyman, who still lingered, though the other golfers had
gone, sought to turn the conversation to golf, but nobody listened to
him except his wife, who sat opposite to him in the warmest part of the
lounge placidly knitting socks for the War Comforts Fund. The Flegne
murder and its result were not discussed; by tacit mutual understanding
the guests never referred to the unpleasant fact that they had lived for
some weeks under the same roof with a man who had since been declared a
murderer by the laws of his country.

Colwyn decided to return to London, although the month he had allowed
himself for a holiday was not completed. He was restless and uneasy and
bored, and he thought that immersion in work would help him to forget
the Glenthorpe case. He came to this decision at breakfast one morning.
Within an hour he had paid his bill, received the polite regrets of the
proprietor at his departure, and was motoring leisurely southward along
the cliff road towards its junction with the main London road.

Important consequences frequently spring from trifling incidents.
Colwyn, turning his car to the side of the road to avoid a flock of
sheep, punctured a tyre on a sharp jagged piece of rock concealed in the
loose sand at the side of the road. He had not a spare tyre on the car,
and the shepherd informed him that the nearest town where he could