“O! what you mean,” I answered, “and that I can see that you mean. What’s the good of our beating about the bush? My friend wouldn’t be the first young fellow of his class to have got into trouble with a good-looking servant girl.”
“No,” he said, “no,” in a hard sort of way. “They are not the kind to bother about the consequences to others where their own gratification is concerned. I’ve knocked up against some pretty bad cases in my time. So, that’s what you gather from the medical report?”
“Partly from that; not wholly.”
“Ah! I dare say now, being on such friendly terms with Mr. Kennett, you’ve been taken into his confidence?”
“Not directly; but in a way that invited me to form my own conclusions. What then? It doesn’t affect this case, does it, except in suggesting a possible motive for the crime on the part of some jealous rival?”
“That’s it. It’s of no consequence, of course—except to the girl herself—from any other point of view.”
His assurance satisfied me, and, taken by his sympathetic candour, I could not refrain from opening my rankling mind to him a bit.
“The truth is,” I said, “that the moment I came down, I saw there was something wrong with my friend. Indeed, he had written to me to imply as much.”
“He was upset like, was he?” commented the detective.
“He was in a very odd mood,” said I—“an aggravated form of hysteria, I should call it. I had never known him quite like it before, though, as I dare say you have gathered, his temperament is an excitable one, up and down like a see-saw. He talked of his dreaming of sitting on a gunpowder barrel smoking a cigarette, and of the hell of an explosion that was coming. And then there was his behaviour at the shoot the next day.”