oss the
marshes and threw something into the sea from the top of the breakwater.
The following day, after Penreath's arrest, I questioned her. She gave
me an explanation which was hardly plausible, but Penreath's silence,
coming after the accumulation of circumstances against him, had caused
me to look at the case from a different angle, and I did not
cross-examine her. The object of her visit to me after the trial was to
admit that she had not told me the truth previously. Her amended story
was obviously the true one. She and Penreath had met by chance on the
seashore near Leyland Hoop two or three weeks before, and had met
secretly afterward. The subsequent actions of these two foolish young
people prove, convincingly enough, that they had fallen passionately in
love with each other. Peggy, however, had never told Penreath her name
or where she lived--because she knew her position was different from
his, she says--and she could not understand how he came to be at the inn
that night. Naturally, she was very much perturbed at his unexpected
appearance. She waited for an opportunity to speak to him after hearing
his voice, but was compelled to attend on her mad grandmother until it
was very late.

"Before going to bed she went down the passage to see if by any chance
he had not retired. There was a light in Mr. Glenthorpe's room, and,
acting on a sudden girlish impulse, she ran along the passage to Mr.
Glenthorpe's door, intending to confide her troubles in one who had
always been very good and kind to her. The door was partly open, and as
she got no reply to her knock, she entered. Mr. Glenthorpe was lying on
his bed, murdered, and on the floor--at the side of the bed--she found
the knife and this silver and enamel match-box. She hid the knife behind
a picture on the wall. She did a very plucky thing the following night
by going into the dead man's room and removing the knife in order to
prevent the police finding it, for by that time she was aware that the
knife formed an important piece of evidence in the case against her
lover. It was the knife she threw into the sea, but she kept the
match-box, which she recognised as Penreath's. When she came to me she
did not intend to tell me anything about the match-box if she could help
it. She was frank enough up to a point, but beyond that point she did
not want to go.

"After Penreath's conviction she began, womanlike, to wonder if she had
not been too hasty in assuming hi