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propriety.
    This course he duly followed. Mr. Manners welcomed him eagerly, carried him off at once to his study, and plied him with questions which Roger found a good deal of difficulty in answering tactfully. The old man seemed very depressed, as was only to be expected, but his grief was dignified and unembarrassing. Pressed with warmth to stay to luncheon and meet the rest of the family, Roger acceded after protest, quietening his conscience with the reflection that at such a time as this the presence of a stranger might be a blessing in disguise to the stricken household; at the least it would take their minds for a few hours off their loss.
    The other four daughters were aged respectively twenty-four, seventeen, fourteen and twelve, and with the eldest, Anne, Roger found himself almost immediately on terms of good friendship. She was one of those capable girls whom the emergency seems so often to produce; and unlike most capable girls, she was good to look upon as well. Not so pretty as Janet had been, perhaps, but in a way more beautiful, and built in miniature; and her air of reposeful efficiency (not the assertive efficiency which most capable women possess) Roger found extremely attractive. Making his mind up with his usual rapidity during lunch, he sought an opportunity after the meal was over to take her aside, and, under pretext of admiring the garden in its garment of budding spring, proceeded to tell her the whole story.
    If Anne was shocked, she scarcely showed it; if she was much upset, she concealed her feelings. She merely replied, gravely: “I see. This is extraordinarily good of you, Mr. Sheringham. And thank you for telling me; I much prefer to know. I quite agree with your conclusions, too, and I’ll do anything to help you confirm them.”
    “And you can?” Roger asked eagerly.
    Anne shook her small head. She was small all over, delicately boned, with small, rather serious features set in a small, oval face. “At the moment,” she confessed, “I don’t see that I can. Janet knew plenty of men round here, of course, and I can give you a list of the ones she knew best, but I’m quite sure that none of them could be at the bottom of it.”
    “We could at any rate find out which of them had been in London since she went up there,” Roger said, loath to abandon the line on which all his hopes were now pinned.
    “We could, of course,” Anne agreed. “And we will, if you think we should. But I’m convinced, Mr. Sheringham, that it isn’t here that we must look for the cause of my sister’s death. When she left here she hadn’t a care in the world, I know. Janet and I——” Her voice faltered for a moment, but recovered immediately—“Janet and I were a good deal more than sisters; we were the most intimate of friends. If she’d been worried before she left here. I’m certain she would have told me.”
    “Well,” said Roger, with more cheerfulness than he felt, “we’ll simply have to see what we can do; that’s all.”
    The upshot was that Roger spent a very pleasant week-end in Dorsetshire, saw a great deal of Anne, who, to his great delight, did not seem to have the faintest wish to discuss his books with him, and returned to London on the Monday apparently not an inch nearer his objective. “Though a week-end in Dorsetshire in early April,” be told the lady in the office as he paid his hotel-bill, “is a thing no man should be without.”
    “Quite,” agreed the young lady.
    Roger strolled down to the station. He had made a point of mentioning to Anne the time of his train, in case anything cropped up that she might want to communicate to him at the last moment. As he walked on to the platform, he looked up and down to see if she were there. She was not.
    With a sense of disappointment which he could not remember having experienced for at least ten years, and of which he became instantly as near to being ashamed as Roger could concerning anything connected with himself, he