Armathwaite blew a big ring of smoke into the air, and darted a number of smaller rings through it. The pattern, beautifully distinct at first, was soon caught in a current from an open window, and eddied into shapelessness. He was thinking hard, and had acted unconsciously, so it was with a sense of surprise that he heard the girl laugh half-heartedly.
"I've been forming mad and outrageous theories until my poor head aches," she said, answering the unspoken question in his eyes. "Some of them begin by being just as perfectly proportioned as your smoke-rings, but they fade away in the next breath."
"My present theory is nebulous enough," he admitted, "but it is not altogether demolished yet. Can you endure a brief analysis of my thoughts? You won't be afraid, and lie awake for hours?"
"No. I mean that I want to hear everything you wish to tell me."
"The man who died here two years ago must have resembled your father in no common degree. Dr. Scaife is not the sort of person who makes a mistake in such a vital matter as the identification of a dead body, especially when the subject is an old and valued friend of his. By the way, you called him uncle, but that, I take it, was merely an affectionate mode of address dating from your childhood?"
"Yes. It's a Yorkshire custom among intimates."
"Have you ever heard of a real uncle—your father's brother—or of a first cousin who was very like him?"
"No. I have asked my people about relatives but we seemed to have none. Even the Ogilvey of the legacy was never mentioned by either of them until mother read me a letter from dad received while we were in Paris."
"Exactly. This testamentary Ogilvey appeared on the scene soon after Stephen Garth died and was buried. Your father was well aware of that occurrence, because he contrived it. He knew that the man who died was coming here, so he sent your mother and you to Paris to get you safely out of the way. Now, don't begin to tremble, and frighten yourself into the belief that I am proving your father's guilt of some dreadful crime. You yourself are convinced that he is incapable of any such act. May I not share your good opinion of him, yet try to reach some sort of firm ground in a quagmire where a false step may prove disastrous? Suppose, Mr. Garth, as he was called at that time, merely got rid of his wife and daughter until an unwelcome guest had been received and sent on his way again, and that fate, with the crassness it can display at times, contrived that the visitor died, or was killed, or committed suicide, at the most awkward moment it is possible to conceive, can you not imagine a hapless, middle-aged scholar availing himself of the most unlikely kind of expedient in order to escape a scandal? Your father is a student, a writer, almost a recluse, yet such a man, driven suddenly into panic-stricken use of his wits, oft-times devises ways and means of humbugging the authorities which an ordinarily clever criminal would neither think of nor dare. I am insisting on this phase of the matter so that you and I may concentrate our intelligence on the line of inquiry most likely to yield results. Let me tabulate my contentions in chronological sequence:
A.—Mr. Garth received some news which led him to disturb the peaceful conditions of life which had obtained during twenty years. His first care was to send his wife and daughter to a place far removed from Elmdale.
B.—Mrs. Garth shared her husband's uneasiness, and agreed to fall in with the plan he had devised.
C.—In order to secure complete secrecy, the whole staff of servants was dismissed, practically at a moment's notice, and probably paid liberal compensation.
D.—After a week of this gradual obliteration of himself in Elmdale, Mr. Garth is missed, with the inevitable outcome that his dead body is found hanging in the hall, and, lest there should be any doubt as to his identity, a letter is left for the coroner, in which he asserts a thing, which his friend, Dr. Scaife, knew to be untrue, namely, that he was suffering from incurable disease. The statement, conveyed otherwise than in a letter, would have been received with skepticism; it was made with the definite object of giving a reason for an apparent suicide, and leaving testimony, in his own handwriting, that the disfigured body could be that of no other person than Stephen Garth. If a general resemblance of the dead to the living did not suffice—if the wearing of certain clothes, and the finding of certain documents and trinkets, such as a watch and chain, for instance—"