a very recent date, though she was supposed to have
broken off with him and to be on with the Mayor. Now then!"

"Do you know that for a fact, Hawthwaite?" asked Tansley.

"I know it for a fact! He used to go there late at night, and stop late.
If you want to know where I got it from, it was from a young woman that
used to be housemaid at the Abbey House, Mrs. Saumarez's place. She's
told me a lot; both Wallingford and Wellesley used to visit there a good
deal, but as I say, Wellesley used to go there very late of an evening.
This young woman says that she knows for a fact that he was often with
her mistress till close on midnight. I don't care twopence what
Wellesley said; I believe he was, and is, after her, and of course he'd
be jealous enough about her being so friendly with Wallingford. There's
a deal more in all this than's come out yet--let me tell you that!"

"I don't think anybody will contradict you, Hawthwaite," observed the
barrister dryly. "But the pertinent fact is what I tell you--the fact of
access! Somebody got to the Mayor's Parlour by way of the back
staircase, through Bunning's rooms, that evening. Who was it? That's
what you've got to find out. If you'd only found out, before now, that
Mrs. Bunning took half an hour to fetch the supper beer that night we
should have been spared a lot of talk this morning. As things are, we're
as wise as ever."

Then Meeking, with a cynical laugh, picked up his papers and went off,
and Brent, leaving Tansley talking to the superintendent, who was
inclined to be huffy, strolled out of the Moot Hall, and went round to
the back, with the idea of seeing for himself the narrow street which
Krevin Crood had formally described. He saw at once that Krevin was an
admirable exponent of the art of description: everything in St. Lawrence
Lane was as the ex-official had said: there was the door into the
Bunnings' rooms, and there, facing it, the ancient church and its
equally ancient churchyard. It was to the churchyard that Brent gave
most attention; he immediately realized that Krevin Crood was quite
right in speaking of it as a place wherein anybody could conveniently
hide--a dark, gloomy, sheltered, high-walled place, filled with thick
shrubbery, out of which, here and there, grew sombre yew-trees, some of
them of an antiquity as venerable as that of the church itself. It would
be a very easy thing indeed, Brent decided, for any designing person to
hide amongst these trees