g in her hand a newspaper.

An inquest of the kind that was held on Colonel Crofton is a godsend to
any local sheet, and Radmore saw at a glance that this county paper had
made the most of it.

"Will you read it here, if you're not in a hurry? I don't want it taken
away; so while you're reading it, I'll go and do some potting over
there."

She disappeared into a glass-house built across a corner of her garden,
and he settled down to read the long newspaper columns.

Soon his feeling quickened into intense interest. The local Essex
reporter had a turn for descriptive writing, and, as he read, Godfrey
Radmore saw the scene described rise vividly before him. He seemed to
visualise the intensely crowded little court-house, the kindly coroner,
the twelve good men and true, and the motley gathering of small town and
country folk drawn together in the hope of hearing something startling.

Yet the facts were simple enough. Colonel Crofton had died from either an
accidental, or a deliberate, over-dose of strychnine. And his death had
been a terrible one.

The outstanding points of interrogation were: Had he consciously added
to a tonic which he was taking an ounce or more of the deadly drug? Or,
as some people were inclined to believe, had the local chemist by some
mistake or gross piece of carelessness, put a murderous amount of
strychnine into a mixture which had been prescribed for his customer
about a fortnight before?

But for the fact that a bottle of nux vomica had been actually found on
the ledge of the dead man's dressing-room window, it would have gone hard
with the chemist. But there the bottle had been found, and in her
evidence, evidently given very clearly and simply, Mrs. Crofton had
explained that, during the war, while in Egypt, she had palpitations of
the heart, and so many drops of diluted strychnine had been ordered her.

When asked why there was so large a bottle full of the deadly stuff, she
had answered that it had come from the Army Stores, where they always did
things in a big and generous way. At that there had been laughter in
Court.

Mrs. Crofton had further explained that, as a matter of fact, she had
brought the bottle back to England without really knowing that she had
done so; and that she had never given it a thought till it had been
found, as described, after her husband's death, by the doctor who had
been called in to attend Colonel Crofton in his agonizing seizure.

One thing state