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POSSIBLE MOTIVES

---- ---- ---- is a human mystery, his past life a greater one.
He elaborately pretends that no part of that past was spent in
Australia.

M. said he knew him there; also that "he'd make him"--pay up!

Blackmail not inconsistent with M.'s character.

Men have died as they deserved before to-day for threatening
blackmail.

_Possible Motive for Marriage_

Atonement of the Guilty to the Innocent.

As Langholm read and re-read these precise pronouncements, with
something of the detachment and the mild surprise with which he
occasionally dipped into his own earlier volumes, he congratulated
himself upon the evidently lucid interval which had produced so much
order from the chaos that had been his mind. Chaotic as its condition
still was, that orderly array of impression, discovery, and surmise,
bore the test of conscientious reconsideration. And there was nothing
that Langholm felt moved to strike out in the train; but, on the other
hand, he saw the weakness of his case as it stood at present, and was
helped to see it by the detective officer's remark to him at Scotland
Yard: "You find one [old Australian] who carries a revolver like this,
and prove that he was in Chelsea on the night of the murder, with a
motive for committing it, and we shall be glad of his name and address."
Langholm had found the old Australian who could be proved to have been
in Chelsea, or thereabouts, on the night in question; but the pistol he
could not hope to find, and the motive was mere surmise.

And yet, to the walls of the mind that he was trying so hard to cleanse
from prejudice and prepossession--to school indeed to an inhuman
fairness--there clung small circumstances and smaller details which
could influence no one else, which would not constitute evidence before
any tribunal, but which weighed more with Langholm himself than all the
points arrayed in his note-book with so much primness and precision.

There was Rachel's vain appeal to her husband, "Find out who _is_ guilty
if you want people to believe that I am not." Why should so natural a
petition have been made in vain, to a husband who after all had shown
some solicitude for his wife's honor, and who had the means to employ
the best detective talent in the world? Langholm could only conceive
one reason: there was nothing for the husband to find out, but
everything for him to hide.

Lang