imself.

"Ye may be as sure o' that, my man, as that Arthur's Seat o'erlooks
Edinbro'!" he said. "I wish I was as sure o' his identity!"

"Well, we know something that's gradually bringing us toward
establishing that," remarked Scarterfield. "Let me see that photograph
again, if you please."

The rest of us watched Scarterfield as he studied the thing over which
Mr. Cazalette and I had exercised our brains in the half-hour before
dinner. He seemed to get no more information from a long perusal of it
than we had got, and he finally threw it away from him across the
table, with a muttered exclamation which confessed discomfiture. Miss
Raven picked up the photograph.

"Aye!" mumbled Mr. Cazalette. "Let the lassie look at it! Maybe a
woman's brains is more use than a man's whiles."

"Often!" said the detective. "And if Miss Raven can make anything of
that----"

I saw that Miss Raven was already wishful to speak, and I hastened to
encourage her by throwing a word to Scarterfield.

"You'd be infinitely obliged to her, I'm sure," I put in. "It would be
a help?"

"No slight one!" said he. "There's something in that diagram.
But--what?"

Miss Raven, timid, and a little shy of concentrated attention, laid
the photograph again on the table.

"Don't--don't you think there may be some explanation of this in what
Salter Quick said to Mr. Middlebrook when they met on the cliffs?" she
asked. "He told Mr. Middlebrook that he wanted to find a churchyard
where there were graves of people named Netherfield, but he didn't
know exactly where it was, though it was somewhere in this locality.
Now supposing this is a rough outline of that churchyard? These outer
lines may be the wall--then these little marks may show the situation
of the Netherfield graves. And that cross in the corner--perhaps there
is something buried, hidden, there, which Salter Quick wanted to
find?"

The detective uttered a sharp exclamation and snatched up the
photograph again.

"Good! Good!" he said. "Upon my word, I shouldn't wonder! To be sure,
that may be it. What's against it?"

"This," remarked Mr. Cazalette solemnly. "That there isn't anybody of
the name of Netherfield buried between Alnmouth and Budle Bay! That's
a fact."

"Established," added the police-inspector, "by as an exhaustive
inquiry as anybody could make. It is a fact--as Mr. Cazalette says."

"Well," observed Scarterfield, "but Salter Quick may have been wrong
in his locality. You