“What do you make of it?” asked Sir Anthony.

What else could I make of it but the one sorry theory?  What woman employs all this subterfuge in order to obtain a weeks liberty for any other purpose than the one elementary purpose of young humanity?

We read the inevitable conclusion in each other’s eyes.

“Who is the man, Duncan?”

“I suppose you have searched her desk and things?”

“Last year.  Everything most carefully.  It was awful—­but we had to.  Not a scrap of paper that wasn’t innocence itself.”

“It can’t be anyone here,” said I.  “You know what the place is.  The slightest spark sends gossip aflame like the fumes of petrol.”

He sat down by my side and rubbed his close-cropped grey head.

“It couldn’t have been young Holmes?”

The little man had a brave directness that sometimes disconcerted me.  I knew the ghastly stab that every word cost him.

“She used to make mock of Randall,” said I.  “Don’t you remember she used to call him ‘the gilded poet’?  Once she said he was the most lady-like young man of her acquaintance.  I don’t admire our young friend, but I think you’re on the wrong track, Anthony.”

“I don’t see it,” said he.  “That sort of flippancy goes for nothing.  Women use it as a sort of quickset hedge of protection.”  He bent forward and tapped me on my senseless knee.  “Young Holmes always used to be in and out of the house.  They had known each other from childhood.  He had a distinguished Oxford career.  When he won the Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch.  I gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember.”

“I remember,” said I.

I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish—­dear old fox-hunting ignoramus—­he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table:  “My God!  The Poet-Laureate’s unhallowed grave!  I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!” It was too tragical a conversation for light allusion.

“The poor dear child—­Edith and I have sized it up—­was all over him that evening.”

“What more youthfully natural,” said I, “than that she should carry off the hero of the occasion—­her childhood’s playfellow?”

“All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken together—­especially if they fit in—­very often make up a whole case for prosecution.”

“You’re a Chairman of Quarter Sessions,” I admitted, “and so you ought to know.”

“I know this,” said he, “that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in January.”  I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement.  To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling.  Yes.  I distinctly recollected the young man’s telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London.  I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.