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no good at all. Well, I hope they'll get him -although a nice-looking young fellow he was and no mistake. A kind of soldierly look about him - ah, well, I dare say he'd been wounded in the war, and sometimes they go a bit queer afterwards, my sister's boy did. Perhaps she'd used him bad - they're a sad lot, those foreigners. Though she was a fine-looking woman. Stood there where you're standing now.”
    “Was she dark or fair?” I ventured. “You can't tell from these newspaper portraits.”
    “Dark hair, and a very white face - too white for nature, I thought - had her lips reddened something cruel. I don't like to see it - a little powder now and then is quite another thing.”
    We were conversing like old friends now. I put another question. “Did she seem nervous or upset at all?”
    “Not a bit. She was smiling to herself, quiet like, as though she was amused at something. That's why you could have knocked me down with a feather when, the next afternoon, those people came running out calling for the police and saying there'd been murder done. I shall never get over it, and as for setting foot in that house after dark I wouldn't do it, not if it was ever so. Why, I wouldn't even stay here at the lodge, if Sir Eustace hadn't been down on his bended knees to me.”
    “I thought Sir Eustace Pedler was at Cannes?”
    “So he was, miss. He came back to England when he heard the news, and, as to the bended knees, that was a figure of speech, his secretary, Mr. Pagett, having offered us double pay to stay on, and, as my John says, money is money nowadays.”
    I concurred heartily with John's by no means original remarks.
    “The young man now,” said Mrs. James, reverting suddenly to a former point in the conversation. “He was upset. His eyes, light eyes, they were, I noticed them particular, was all shining. Excited, I thought. But I never dreamt of anything being wrong. Not even when he came out again looking all queer.”
    “How long was he in the house?”
    “Oh, not long, a matter of five minutes maybe.”
    “How tall was he, do you think? About six foot?”
    “I should say so maybe.”
    “He was clean-shaven, you say?”
    “Yes, miss - not even one of those toothbrush moustaches.”
    “Was his chin at all shiny?” I asked on a sudden impulse.
    Mrs. James stared at me with awe.
    “Well, now you come to mention it, miss, it was. However did you know?”
    “It's a curious thing, but murderers often have shiny chins,” I explained wildly.
    Mrs. James accepted the statement in all good faith. “Really, now, miss. I never heard that before.”
    “You didn't notice what kind of a head he had, I suppose?”
    “Just the ordinary kind, miss. I'll fetch you the keys, shall I?”
    I accepted them, and went on my way to the Mill House. My reconstructions so far I considered good. All along I had realized that the differences between the man Mrs. James had described and my Tube “doctor” were those of non-essentials. An overcoat, a beard, gold-rimmed eye-glasses. The “doctor” had appeared middle-aged, but I remembered that he had stooped over the body like a comparatively young man. There had been a suppleness which told of young joints.
    The victim of the accident (the Moth Ball man, as I called him to myself) and the foreign woman, Mrs. de Castina, or whatever her real name was, had had an assignation to meet at the Mill House. That was how I pieced the thing together. Either because they feared they were being watched or from some other reason, they chose the rather ingenious method of both getting an order to view the same house. Thus their meeting there might have the appearance of pure chance.
    That the Moth Ball man had suddenly caught sight of the “doctor,” and that the meeting was totally unexpected and alarming to him, was another fact of which I was fairly sure. What had happened next? The “doctor” had removed his disguise and followed the woman to Marlow. But it was possible that had he