“Thou takest not away, O Death?
Thou strikest—absence perisheth,
Indifference is no more;
The future brightens on our sight;
For on the past hath fallen a light
That tempts us to adore.”
While Juanita clung with feverish intensity to the hope of discovering her husband’s murderer Lord Cheriton seemed to be gradually resigning himself to the idea that the crime would go to swell the long list of undiscovered murders which he could recall within his own experience of life—crimes which had kept society expectant and on the alert for a month, and which had stimulated the police to unwonted exertions, finally to fade into oblivion, or to be occasionally cited as an example of the mysteriousness of human history.
He had offered a large reward, he had brought all his own trained intelligence to bear upon the subject; he had thought and brooded upon it by day and by night; and the result had been nil. A hand had been stretched out of the darkness to slay an unoffending young man, in whose life his daughter’s happiness had been bound up. That was the whole history of the murder. A shot heard in the night, a bullet fired out of the darkness with fatal aim.
Not one indication, not one suggestive fact had been discovered since the night of the murder.
“It is hopeless,” said Lord Cheriton, talking over the calamity with Mr. Scarsdale, the Vicar of Cheriton and Testwick, adjoining parishes; “the crime and the motive of the crime are alike inscrutable. If one could imagine a reason for the act it might be easier to get upon the track of the murderer; but there is no reason that I can conceive for such a deed. It has been suggested to me that Sir Godfrey might have had a secret enemy—that his life might not have been as spotless as we think——”