“Revenge for what?”
“Ah! if we only knew the reason it would not be difficult to find the murderer,” answered the man who loved my wife. “It may be that some person sought revenge for an imaginary grievance.”
“But why was the Colonel walking at that lonely spot at that hour? He must have had an object. It looks suspiciously as though he went to keep a secret appointment. The excuse that he was ill seems to have been made with a view to securing his room from intruders who might disturb him.”
“He may have kept an appointment,” his son replied. “But only he himself could tell us the truth.”
The detective acquiesced, and after some further conversation, in which I joined, he rose, and passing through into the library, commenced an examination of the papers lying on the writing-table. With my rival in the affections of the woman who was my wife, I assisted him, while the widow stood behind us watching, her face pale and anxious and her nervous hands trembling.
She was in fear. Of that I felt absolutely convinced. But what discovery did she dread?
While we were bending, examining the contents of one of the drawers, which was full of papers relating to the Colonel’s duty as a justice of the peace—for it was here that he performed his judicial work—his widow stood behind me, and, with a quick movement, sidled up to her stepson. The next instant it occurred to me that she had passed something to him; but, pretending to be engrossed in the papers, I made no sign that I had observed their rapid exchange.
“Have you found anything?” she inquired calmly, after a few moments.
“No; nothing, unfortunately,” Bullen responded. And then, having searched the room from top to bottom, suggested a move to the Colonel’s bedroom.
Here the search, both of the clothes in his wardrobe and of the room wherein he usually slept, likewise proved fruitless. After twenty minutes or so, however, I contrived, while the others were busy turning over the dead man’s effects, to slip back to the library. Young Chetwode had, at the moment when the suspicious movement had been made behind me, stood with his back to the black marble mantelshelf, and it was to examine this that I returned. While doing so I suddenly found a crack between the wall and the upright marble support, where the plaster had dried out by the heat of the winter fires, and, peering within, I saw something concealed there.