occupation, surely?"

"Reasoning as you and I are doing here quietly, at our ease, in this
room, no doubt you are right, Mr. Pettifer. But criminals are caught
because they don't reason quietly when they have just committed a crime.
The behaviour of a man whose mind is influenced by that condition cannot
be explained always by any laws of psychology. He may be in a wild panic.
He may act as madmen act, or like a child in a rage. And if my
explanation is weak it's no weaker than the only other hypothesis: that
Mrs. Ballantyne herself dragged him into the open."

Mr. Pettifer shook his head.

"I am not so sure. I can conceive a condition of horror in the wife,
horror at what she had done, which would make that act not merely
possible but almost inevitable. I make no claims to being an imaginative
man, Mr. Thresk, but I try to put myself into the position of the wife";
and he described with a vividness for which Thresk was not prepared the
scene as he saw it.

"She goes to bed, she undresses and goes to bed--she must do that if
she is to escape--she puts out her light, she lies in the dark awake,
and under the same roof, close to her, in the dark too, is lying the man
she has killed. Just a short passage separates her from him. There are
no doors--mind that, Mr. Thresk--no doors to lock and bolt, merely a
grass screen which you could lift with your forefinger. Wouldn't any and
every one of the little cracks and sounds and breathings, of which the
quietest and stillest night is full, sound to her like the approach of
the dead man? The faintest breath of air would seem a draught made by
the swinging of the grass-curtain as it was stealthily lifted--lifted by
the dead man. No, Mr. Thresk. The wife is just the one person I could
imagine who would do that needless barbarous violence of dragging the
body into the open--and she would do it, not out of cruelty, but because
she must or go mad."

Thresk listened without a movement until Robert Pettifer had finished.
Then he said:

"You know Mrs. Ballantyne. Has she the strength which she must have had
to drag a heavy man across the carpet of a tent and fling him outside?"

"Not now, not before. But just at the moment? You argued, Mr. Thresk,
that it is impossible to foresee what people will do under the immediate
knowledge that they have committed a capital crime. I agree. But I go a
little further. I say that they will also exhibit a physical strength
with which it would be