and
produced her proofs. Hawthwaite took it all in silently.

"You'll have to go into that, you know," concluded Brent. "Now that I've
got through with that election I'm going to give more time to this
business. We've got to find out who killed my cousin, Hawthwaite,
somehow--it's not going to rest. I won't leave a stone unturned! And
there," he added, pointing to the sheet of paper on which Queenie had
made specimens of the broken type of Simon's antiquated machine, "is a
stone which needs examining on all four sides!"

Hawthwaite picked up the sheet of paper, twisted it in his big fingers,
and looked over it at the two young people with a quizzical smile.

"I understand that you and Miss Queenie there are contemplating
matrimony, Mr. Brent?" he remarked. "That so, sir?"

"That's so," replied Brent promptly. "As soon as we've got our house
furnished we'll be married."

"Then I can speak freely and in confidence before Mrs. Brent that's to
be," responded Hawthwaite, with another smile. "Well, now, what you've
just told me isn't exactly fresh news to me! I'll show you something."
He turned, drew out a drawer from a chest behind his chair, and finding
a paper in it took it out and handed it to his visitors. "Look at that,
now!" he said. "You see what it is?"

Brent saw at once. It was a half-sheet of notepaper, on which were
examples of faulty type, precisely similar to those on Queenie's bit of
evidence.

"Hello!" exclaimed Brent. "Somebody else been at the same game, eh?"

"I'll tell you," answered Hawthwaite, settling himself in his chair.
"It's a bit since--let us think, now--yes, it would be a day or two
after that facsimile appeared in the _Monitor_ that a young man came to
me here one evening: respectable artisan sort of chap. He told me that
he was in the employ of a typewriter company at Clothford, which, Mr.
Brent, as Miss Queenie there knows, is our big town, only a few miles
away. He said that he'd come to tell me something in confidence. The
previous day, he said, Mr. Crood, of Hathelsborough, had come to their
place in Clothford and had brought with him an old-fashioned typewriter
which, he told them, he had bought when such things first came out. He
wanted to know the thing being, he said, an old favourite--if they
couldn't do it up for him, go through its mechanism thoroughly, supply
new letters, and so on. They said they could. He left it to be done, and
it was handed over to this young man. Now