Ellery asked no questions at first. The news seemed for the moment to strike him dumb, and the first clear thought that arose in his mind was that, now at least, there could be no more question of Joan marrying Prinsep. Ellery had most cordially disliked and distrusted Prinsep, and he could not pretend to feel any great sorrow at his death. But he had greatly liked George Brooklyn, and, after his first thought, it was mainly the terrible sorrow that had come upon all those who were left that filled his mind. For a time he and Lucas spoke of nothing but the depth of the tragedy that had come upon the Brooklyns.
But, by-and-by, Ellery’s curiosity began to assert itself. After all there was mystery as well as tragedy in the events of Tuesday night; and mystery had always exercised over him a strong fascination. “I feel a beast,” he said to his guardian, “for thinking of anything but the sorrow of it all; but I’m damned if I can help wanting to find out all about it.”
“My dear Bob, that’s perfectly natural. It would be so in any one; but it’s more than natural in your case. You write detective novels; and here you are faced with a crime mystery in real life. You would be more than human if you didn’t want to unravel it. Besides, seriously enough, it wants unravelling, and I don’t think the police are going to have an easy time in finding out the truth.”
Then Lucas told him of the strange clues that had been discovered—how all the evidence seemed to point to the conclusion that Prinsep had murdered George Brooklyn, and equally to the conclusion that George had murdered Prinsep.
“Of course,” Lucas added, “that is physically quite impossible; and personally, I’m not in the least disposed to believe that either of them killed the other. I’m sure in my own mind that some one else killed both of them; but I haven’t a ghost of an idea who it can have been.”
“And so there’s nothing been found out to throw suspicion on anybody else?”
“So far as I know, nothing at all. You’d better do a bit of detective work on your own account.”
Ellery said nothing in reply to that. While they had been talking, he had been turning over in his mind the question whether, after what had happened, he could possibly speak to his guardian about his love for Joan. He had told himself firmly that he could not; but, just when he had thought his mind made up, he found himself beginning to speak about it all the same. He was so full of it that he could not keep from declaring it.
“Was Joan really engaged to Prinsep?” he asked.
Harry Lucas had a good idea of Ellery’s reason for asking the question. But he gave no hint of this in his answer, preferring to let the young man speak or not of his own affairs, as might seem to him best.