“I could enlighten them as to the cause of the young lithographer’s anxiety at the magisterial inquiry, but, I assure you, I do not care to do the work of the police for them.  Why should I?  Greenhill will never suffer from unjust suspicions.  He and his father alone—­besides myself—­know in what a terribly tight corner he all but found himself.

“The young man did not reach home till nearly five o’clock that morning.  His last train had gone; he had to walk, lost his way, and wandered about Hampstead for hours.  Think what his position would have been if the worthy confectioners of Percy Street had not seen Mrs. Owen ‘wrapped up in a shawl, on her knees, doing the front steps.’

“Moreover, Mr. Greenhill senior is a solicitor, who has a small office in John Street, Bedford Row.  The afternoon before her death Mrs. Owen had been to that office and had there made a will by which she left all her savings to young Arthur Greenhill, lithographer.  Had that will been in other than paternal hands, it would have been proved, in the natural course of such things, and one other link would have been added to the chain which nearly dragged Arthur Greenhill to the gallows—­’the link of a very strong motive.’

“Can you wonder that the young man turned livid, until such time as it was proved beyond a doubt that the murdered woman was alive hours after he had reached the safe shelter of his home?

“I saw you smile when I used the word ‘murdered,’” continued the man in the corner, growing quite excited now that he was approaching the denouement of his story.  “I know that the public, after the magistrate had discharged Arthur Greenhill, were quite satisfied to think that the mystery in Percy Street was a case of accident—­or suicide.”

“No,” replied Polly, “there could be no question of suicide, for two very distinct reasons.”

He looked at her with some degree of astonishment.  She supposed that he was amazed at her venturing to form an opinion of her own.

“And may I ask what, in your opinion, these reasons are?” he asked very sarcastically.

“To begin with, the question of money,” she said—­“has any more of it been traced so far?”

“Not another L5 note,” he said with a chuckle; “they were all cashed in Paris during the Exhibition, and you have no conception how easy a thing that is to do, at any of the hotels or smaller agents de change.”

“That nephew was a clever blackguard,” she commented.

“You believe, then, in the existence of that nephew?”

“Why should I doubt it?  Some one must have existed who was sufficiently familiar with the house to go about in it in the middle of the day without attracting any one’s attention.”

“In the middle of the day?” he said with a chuckle.

“Any time after 8.30 in the morning.”

“So you, too, believe in the ‘caretaker, wrapped up in a shawl,’ cleaning her front steps?” he queried.