“And what if I am? What business is it of yours?” he asked resentfully, and in evident alarm.
“My business is with you if your name is Alfred Dawnay,” I said. “Mr Melvill Arnold is, I regret to say, dead, and—”
“Dead!” he gasped, lowering his weapon and staring at me, the colour dying from his face. “Arnold dead! Is this the truth—are you quite certain?”
“The unfortunate gentleman died in my presence.”
“Where? Abroad, I suppose?”
“No; in a small hotel off the Strand,” was my reply.
The news I had imparted to him seemed to hold him amazed and stupefied.
“Poor Arnold! Dead!” he repeated blankly to himself, sitting with both hands upon his knees—for he had flung the pistol upon the cushion. “Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly, raising his eyes to mine.
“Forgive me for receiving you in this antagonistic manner, sir, but—but you don’t know what Mr Arnold’s death means to me. It means everything to me—all that—” But his lips closed with a snap without concluding his sentence.
“A few moments before he died he gave me this letter, with instructions to meet you at Totnes to-day,” and I handed him the dead man’s missive.