e servants and my friends came and we ran out, to find the
man lying by that shrubbery quite dead. I turned him over and had just
grasped the fact that he was my brother-in-law, when Lady Agnes ran out.
When she learned the news she naturally fainted. The women carried her
back to her room, and we took the body of Pine into the house. A doctor
came along this morning--for I sent for a doctor as soon as it was
dawn--and said that Pine had been shot through the heart."

"And who shot him?" asked Darby sagely.

Garvington pointed to the shrubbery. "Someone was concealed there," he
declared.

"How do you know, that, my lord?"

"My sister, attracted by my shot, jumped out of bed and threw up her
window. She saw the man--of course she never guessed that he was
Pine--running down the path and saw him fall by the shrubbery when the
second shot was fired."

"Her bedroom is then on this side of the house, my lord?"

"Up there," said Garvington, pointing directly over the narrow door,
which was painted a rich blue color, and looked rather bizarre, set in
the puritanic greyness of the walls. "My own bedroom is further along
towards the right. That is why I heard the footsteps so plainly on this
gravel." And he stamped hard, while with a wave of his hand he invited
the inspector to examine the surroundings.

Darby did so with keen eyes and an alert brain. The two stood on the
west side of the mansion, where it fronted the three-miles distant
Abbot's Wood. The Manor was a heterogeneous-looking sort of place,
suggesting the whims and fancies of many generations, for something was
taken away here, and something was taken away there, and this had been
altered, while that had been left in its original state, until the house
seemed to be made up of all possible architectural styles. It was a tall
building of three stories, although the flattish red-tiled roofs took
away somewhat from its height, and spread over an amazing quantity of
land. As Darby thought, it could have housed a regiment, and must have
cost something to keep up. As wind and weather and time had mellowed its
incongruous parts into one neutral tint, it looked odd and attractive.
Moss and lichen, ivy and Virginia creeper--this last flaring in crimson
glory--clothed the massive stone walls with a gracious mantle of natural
beauty. Narrow stone steps, rather chipped, led down from the blue door
to the broad, yellow path, which came round the rear of the house and
swep