"I believe, Mr. Brent, that you visited your cousin here in the town about Christmas last? Did he say anything to you about Hathelsborough at that time? I mean, as regards what he called his Augean stables task?"
Brent hesitated. He glanced at the eagerly-listening spectators, and he smiled a little.
"Well," he replied half-hesitatingly, "he did! He said that in his opinion Hathelsborough was the rottenest and most corrupt little town in all England!"
"Did you take that as a seriously meant statement, Mr. Brent?"
"Oh, well—he laughed as he made it. I took it as a specimen of his rather heightened way of putting things."
"Did he say anything that led you to think that he believed himself to have bitter enemies in the town?"
"No," said Brent, "he did not."
"Neither then nor at any other time?"
"Neither then nor at any other time."
The Coroner asked no further questions, and Brent sat down again by Tansley, and settled himself to consider whatever evidence might follow. He tried to imagine himself a Coroner or juryman, and to estimate and weigh the testimony of each succeeding witness in its relation to the matter into which the court was inquiring. Some of it, he thought, was relevant; some had little in it that carried affairs any further. Yet he began to see that even the apparently irrelevant evidence was not without its importance. They were links, these statements, these answers; links that went to the making of a chain.