"I should think so. I confess the whole thing licks me. I can't imagine who can have done it."
"No one knows. Lady Jenny says no one ever will know!"
"I suppose not. It seems to be relegated to the list of undiscovered crimes. Do you know, Brenda, I have had my suspicions!"
A cold hand clutched the girl's heart. She immediately thought of her father. "Have you?" she faltered. "Of whom?"
"Well, I wouldn't tell every one, as I have really no sort of basis for them. They are the purest suspicions. But I suspect that big Dutchman who was staying at your place."
"Van Zwieten!" Brenda's mind ran over the events of that terrible night. The Dutchman had been out; he had come in after her. But again her father had told the servants that Van Zwieten was in the study with him--a distinct falsehood. Whichever way she looked at it, her father seemed to be mixed up in the matter. "Yet what possible motive could Van Zwieten have had to impel him to such a crime?" she asked Wilfred.
"It might be a political crime," said the young man, his face lighting up as it invariably did when he talked politics. "Gilbert was an Imperialist--always preaching and writing against the Boers. Van Zwieten is Dutch, and is going out to an appointment at Pretoria; also he is an intimate friend of Dr. Leyds. He might have wished to get Gilbert out of the way because he was dangerous to his schemes."
"Surely he wouldn't have gone the length of murder for such a reason."
"Oh, I don't know. If he could without being found out, I am certain he would. I don't say Van Zwieten fired the shot himself, but he might have hired some one to do it."
"What makes you think that, Wilfred?"