“How do you make that out, vicar?” asked Ned, very quietly.
Since that outburst of fury the evening before he had been very subdued—almost amiable.
“Why, I cannot conceive any motive strong enough to induce anybody else to make away with them. If they were really dangerous to some one’s secret, poisoning them was too suspicious an act. Besides, my brother—I mean the churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s has just been laid out as a garden, and the wall has been fringed with broken glass to keep out all unauthorized intruders. Now what could a man kill your dogs for?”
“I have my own ideas as to the reason,” said Ned. Then, after a short pause, he added, “You see, the poisoning of the hounds led to a delay. Now a hunted criminal lives by delays.”
“Hunted criminal!” Poor Olivia echoed these terrible words below her breath. The very sound of them blanched her cheeks and seemed to check the beating of her heart.
It was again Ned who spoke—
“Tell me, vicar, what you mean by suggesting that I poisoned my hounds in my sleep.”
“Don’t you know,” said Mr. Brander, “how an active man forced into inaction will brood over an idea until it is never out of his brain? I imagine that you, moved as you certainly were by fears for the safety of your dogs while you were ill, got these fears so strongly in your mind that at last you got up one night, and with your own hands did what it was always in your mind that some one else would do—laid about the poison which the dogs took as soon as they by some means got loose.”
“Dear me! Very ingenious theory—very ingenious!” said Mr. Williams.
“I don’t suppose,” went on the vicar, modestly, “that the idea would have come into my head if it had not been that in my own family there have been marvellous instances of somnambulism. An ancestor of mine, a very energetic man who loved the sound of his own voice, had been ordered a rest from preaching by his doctor. Well, I assure you that after obeying this injunction three months, he got up one night, got the church keys, let himself in, and was discovered there by his wife in the pulpit, preaching a sermon in his dressing-gown and slippers! And there have been numberless other instances in our family—some within this century.”