"On the other hand Major Rawstone saw him in the forecourt coming away from the five-acre meadow only a very few moments after the shots were fired, and gave it absolutely as his opinion that it would have been impossible for the accused to have fired those shots. This is where the question of time came in.
"'When a man who bears a spotless reputation,' Major Rawstone argued, 'finds that he has killed a fellow creature, he would necessarily pause a moment, horror-struck with what he has done; whether the deed was premeditated or involuntary he would at least try and ascertain if life was really extinct. It is inconceivable that any man save an habitual and therefore callous criminal, would just throw down his weapon and with absolute calm, hands in pocket and without a tremor in his voice, make a casual remark to a friend. Now I saw Mr. Morley Thrall perhaps two minutes after the shots were fired; in that time he could not have walked from the centre of the field to the forecourt where I was standing; and he had not been running as his voice was absolutely clear and he came walking towards me with his hands in his pockets.'
"As was only to be expected, Sir Evelyn Thrall made the most of Major Rawstone's evidence, and I may say that it was chiefly on the strength of it that the charge of murder against the accused was withdrawn, even though the Clerk to the Magistrates, perpetually egged on by Miss Glenluce, did his best to upset Major Rawstone. When the lady found that this could not be done, she tried to switch back to the idea that accused had abstracted the revolver out of the smoking-room before dinner and immediately after his quarrel with Colonel Forburg. The footman Cambalt's evidence on this point had been somewhat discounted by his refusing to state positively that no one could have gone into the smoking-room at that time without his seeing them. But against this theory there was always the argument—of which Sir Evelyn Thrall made the most as you know—that before dinner the accused could not have known that there would be an alarm of burglary which would give him the opportunity of waylaying the Colonel in the open field. With equal skill, too, Sir Evelyn brought forward evidence to bear out the statement made by the accused on the matter of his quarrel with Colonel Forburg.
"'Just before dinner,' Mr. Thrall stated, 'Colonel Forburg told me he had something to say to me in private. I followed him into the smoking-room, and there he gave me certain information with regard to his past life, and also with regard to Miss Glenluce's parentage, which made it absolutely impossible for me, in spite of the deep regard which I have for that lady, to offer her marriage. Miss Glenluce is the innocent victim of tragic circumstances in the past, and Forburg was just an unmitigated blackguard, and I told him so, but I had my family to consider and very reluctantly I came to the conclusion that I could not introduce any relation of Colonel Forburg into its circle. Colonel Forburg did not stand in the way of my marrying his stepdaughter; it was I who most reluctantly withdrew.'
"Whilst the accused was cross-examined upon this statement, and he gave his answers in firm, dignified tones, Miss Monica never took her eyes off him, and surely if looks could kill, Mr. Morley Thrall would not at that moment have escaped with his life, so full of deadly hatred and contempt was her gaze. The accused had signed a much fuller statement than the one which he made in open court; it contained a detailed account of his interview with Colonel Forburg, and of the circumstances which finally induced him to give up all thoughts of asking Miss Glenluce to be his wife.
"These facts were not made public at the time for the sake of Miss Monica and of the unfortunate, Gerald, but it seems that the transactions which had earned for the Colonel the sobriquet of 'Remount Forburg' were so disreputable and so dishonest that not only was he cashiered from the army, but he served a term of imprisonment for treason, fraud, and embezzlement. He had no right to be styled Colonel any longer, and quite recently had been threatened with prosecution if he persisted in making further use of his army rank.
"But this was not all the trouble. It seems that in his career of improbity he had been associated with a man named Nosdel, a man of Dutch extraction whom he had known in South Africa. This man was subsequently hanged for a particularly brutal murder, and it was his widow who was 'Remount Forburg's' second wife, and the mother of Monica and of Gerald, who had been given the fancy name of Glenluce.
"Obviously a man in Mr. Morley Thrall's position could not marry into such a family, and it appears that whenever there was a question of a suitor for Monica, 'Remount Forburg' would tell the aspirant the whole story of his own shady past and, above all, that of Monica's father. Sir Evelyn Thrall had been clever enough to discover one or two gentlemen who had had the same experience as his cousin Morley; they, too, just before their courtship came to a head had had a momentous interview with 'Remount Forburg,' who found this means of choking off any further desire for matrimony on the part of a man who had family connections to consider. But it was very obvious that Mr. Morley Thrall had no motive for killing 'Remount Forburg'; he would have left Brudenell Court that very evening, he said, only that young Glenluce had begged him, for Monica's sake, not to make a scene; anyway, he was leaving the house the next day and had no intention of ever darkening its doors again.
"Poor Monica Glenluce or Nosdel, ignorant of the hideous cloud that hung over her entire life, ignorant, too, of what had passed between her stepfather and Mr. Morley Thrall, felt nothing but hatred and contempt for the man whose love, she believed, had proved as unstable as that of any of her other admirers. For charity's sake one must suppose that she really thought him guilty at first, and hoped that when the clouds had rolled by he would return to her more ardent than before. Presumably he found means to make her understand that all was irrevocably at an end between them as far as he was concerned, whereupon her regard for him turned to bitterness and desire for revenge.
"And, indeed, but for the cleverness of a distinguished lawyer, poor Morley Thrall might have found himself the victim of a judicial error brought about by the deliberate enmity of a woman. Had he been committed for trial, she would have had more time at her disposal to manufacture evidence against him, which I am convinced she had a mind to do."