have been inflicted at that angle of the skull. They experimented with a dummy figure falling in every conceivable position.’

‘But the motive?’ exclaimed Sir Lulworth; ‘no one had any interest in doing away with him, and the number of people who destroy Canons of the Established Church for the mere fun of killing must be extremely limited. Of course there are individuals of weak mental balance who do that sort of thing, but they seldom conceal their handiwork; they are more generally inclined to parade it.’

‘His cook was under suspicion,’ said Egbert shortly.

‘I know he was,’ said Sir Lulworth, ‘simply because he was about the only person on the premises at the time of the tragedy. But could anything be sillier than trying to fasten a charge of murder on to Sebastien? He had nothing to gain, in fact, a good deal to lose, from the death of his employer. The Canon was paying him quite as good wages as I was able to offer him when I took him over into my service. I have since raised them to something a little more in accordance with his real worth, but at the time he was glad to find a new place without troubling about an increase of wages. People were fighting rather shy of him, and he had no friends in this country. No; if any one in the world was interested in the prolonged life and unimpaired digestion of the Canon it would certainly be Sebastien.’

‘People don’t always weigh the consequences of their rash acts,’ said Egbert, ‘otherwise there would be very few murders committed. Sebastien is a man of hot temper.’

‘He is a southerner,’ admitted Sir Lulworth; ‘to be geographically exact I believe he hails from the French slopes of the Pyrenees. I took that into consideration when he nearly killed the gardener’s boy the other day for bringing him a spurious substitute for sorrel. One must always make allowances for origin and locality and early environment; “Tell me your longitude and I’ll know what latitude to allow you,” is my motto.’

‘There, you see,’ said Egbert, ‘he nearly killed the gardener’s boy.’

‘My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener’s boy and altogether killing a Canon there is a wide difference. No doubt you have often felt a temporary desire to kill a gardener’s boy; you have never given way to it, and I respect you for your self-control. But I don’t suppose you have ever wanted to kill an octogenarian Canon. Besides, as far as we know, there had never been any quarrel or disagreement between the two men. The evidence at the inquest brought that out very clearly.’

‘Ah!’ said Egbert, with the air of a man coming at last into a deferred inheritance of conversational importance, ‘that is precisely what I want to speak to you about.’

He pushed away his coffee cup and drew a pocket-book from his inner breast-pocket. From the depths of the pocket-book he produced an envelope, and from the envelope he extracted a letter, closely written in a small, neat handwriting.

‘One of the Canon’s numerous letters to Aunt Adelaide,’ he explained, ‘written a few days before his death. Her memory was already failing when she received it, and I dare say she forgot the contents as soon as she had read it; otherwise, in the light of what subsequently happened, we should have heard something of this letter before now. If it had been produced at the inquest I fancy it would have made some difference in the course of affairs. The evidence, as you remarked just now, choked off suspicion against Sebastien by disclosing an utter absence of anything that could be considered a motive or provocation for the crime, if crime there was.’

‘Oh, read the letter,’ said Sir Lulworth impatiently.

‘It’s a long rambling affair, like most of his letters in his later years,’ said Egbert. ‘I’ll read the part that bears immediately on the mystery.