as Dexter
had inspired in the faithful woman who had just left me? in the rough
gardener who had carried him out so gently on the previous night? Who
can decide? The greatest scoundrel living always has a friend--in a
woman or a dog.

I sat down again at my desk, and made another attempt to write to Mr.
Playmore.

Recalling, for the purpose of my letter, all that Miserrimus Dexter
had said to me, my memory dwelt with special interest on the strange
outbreak of feeling which had led him to betray the secret of his
infatuation for Eustace's first wife. I saw again the ghastly scene in
the death-chamber--the deformed creature crying over the corpse in the
stillness of the first dark hours of the new day. The horrible picture
took a strange hold on my mind. I arose, and walked up and down, and
tried to turn my thoughts some other way. It was not to be done: the
scene was too familiar to me to be easily dismissed. I had myself
visited the room and looked at the bed. I had myself walked in the
corridor which Dexter had crossed on his way to take his last leave of
her.

The corridor? I stopped. My thoughts suddenly took a new direction,
uninfluenced by any effort of my will.

What other association besides the association with Dexter did I connect
with the corridor? Was it something I had seen during my visit to
Gleninch? No. Was it something I had read? I snatched up the Report
of the Trial to see. It opened at a page which contained the nurse's
evidence. I read the evidence through again, without recovering the lost
remembrance until I came to these lines close at the end:

"Before bed-time I went upstairs to prepare the remains of the deceased
lady for the coffin. The room in which she lay was locked; the door
leading into Mr. Macallan's room being secured, as well as the door
leading into the corridor. The keys had been taken away by Mr. Gale. Two
of the men-servants were posted outside the bedroom to keep watch. They
were to be relieved at four in the morning--that was all they could tell
me."

There was my lost association with the corridor! There was what I ought
to have remembered when Miserrimus Dexter was telling me of his visit to
the dead!

How had he got into the bedroom--the doors being locked, and the keys
being taken away by Mr. Gale? There was but one of the locked doors of
which Mr. Gale had not got the key--the door of communication between
the study and the bedroom. The key was missing from this.