He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by our faces. He smiled bitterly. “Go on,” he said. “Take it down. It can’t hurt anybody. I don’t know who did it, and that’s God’s truth.”
And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got.
He suspected who had done it, but he did not know. He absolutely refused to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense of delicacy, I think, kept us all from pressing the question of the A 31 matter.
“That’s a personal affair,” he said. “I’ve had a good bit of trouble. I’m thinking now of going back to England.”
And, as I say, we did not insist.
When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say. He had left the same impression on all of us, I think—of trouble, but not of crime. Of a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost despair. He still had the letters. He had, after all, as much right to them as we had, which was, actually, no right at all. And, whatever it was, he still had his secret.
Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen. Sperry’s attitude was more philosophical.
“A woman, of course,” he said. “The A 31 letter shows it. He tried to get her back, perhaps, by holding the letters over her head. And it hasn’t worked out. Poor devil! Only—who is the woman?”
It was that night, the fifteenth day after the crime, that the solution came. Came as a matter of fact, to my door.
I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse book on psychic phenomena. My wife, I recall, had just asked me to change a banjo record for “The End of a Pleasant Day,” when the bell rang.