‘It is different,’ he said. ‘The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way—not through YOURSELF—somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.’

‘No,’ she said, pondering. ‘You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you.’

But this only made him shut off from her.

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘words make no matter, any way. The thing IS between us, or it isn’t.’

‘You don’t even love me,’ she cried.

‘I do,’ he said angrily. ‘But I want—’ His mind saw again the lovely golden light of spring transfused through her eyes, as through some wonderful window. And he wanted her to be with him there, in this world of proud indifference. But what was the good of telling her he wanted this company in proud indifference. indifference What was the good of talking, any way? It must happen beyond the sound of words. It was merely ruinous to try to work her by conviction. This was a paradisal bird that could never be netted, it must fly by itself to the heart.

‘I always think I am going to be loved—and then I am let down. You DON’T love me, you know. You don’t want to serve me. You only want yourself.’

A shiver of rage went over his veins, at this repeated: ‘You don’t want to serve me.’ All the paradisal disappeared from him.

‘No,’ he said, irritated, ‘I don’t want to serve you, because there is nothing there to serve. What you want me to serve, is nothing, mere nothing. It isn’t even you, it is your mere female quality. And I wouldn’t give a straw for your female ego—it’s a rag doll.’

‘Ha!’ she laughed in mockery. ‘That’s all you think of me, is it? And then you have the impudence to say you love me.’

She rose in anger, to go home.

You want the paradisal unknowing,’ she said, turning round on him as he he still sat half–visible in the shadow. ‘I know what that means, thank you. You want me to be your thing, never to criticise you or to have anything to say for myself. You want me to be a mere THING for you! No thank you! IF you want that, there are plenty of women who will give it to you. There are plenty of women who will lie down for you to walk over them—GO to them then, if that’s what you want—go to them.’

‘No,’ he said, outspoken with anger. ‘I want you to drop your assertive WILL, your frightened apprehensive self–insistence, that is what I want. I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.’

‘Let myself go!’ she re–echoed in mockery. ‘I can let myself go, easily enough. It is you who can’t let yourself go, it is you who hang on to yourself as if it were your only treasure. YOU—YOU are the Sunday school teacher—YOU—you preacher.’

“This was the first point gained. I then walked slowly down the garden path, which happened to be composed of a clay soil, peculiarly suitable for taking impressions. No doubt it appeared to you to be a mere trampled line of slush, but to my trained eyes every mark upon its surface had a meaning. There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps. Happily, I have always laid great stress upon it, and much practice has made it second nature to me. I saw the heavy footmarks of the constables, but I saw also the track of the two men who had first passed through the garden. It was easy to tell that they had been before the others, because in places their marks had been entirely obliterated by the others coming upon the top of them. In this way my second link was formed, which told me that the nocturnal visitors were two in number, one remarkable for his height (as I calculated from the length of his stride), and the other fashionably dressed, to judge from the small and elegant impression left by his boots.

“On entering the house this last inference was confirmed. My well-booted man lay before me. The tall one, then, had done the murder, if murder there was. There was no wound upon the dead man’s person, but the agitated expression upon his face assured me that he had foreseen his fate before it came upon him. Men who die from heart disease, or any sudden natural cause, never by any chance exhibit agitation upon their features. Having sniffed the dead man’s lips, I detected a slightly sour smell, and I came to the conclusion that he had had poison forced upon him. Again, I argued that it had been forced upon him from the hatred and fear expressed upon his face. By the method of exclusion, I had arrived at this result, for no other hypothesis would meet the facts. Do not imagine that it was a very unheard-of idea. The forcible administration of poison is by no means a new thing in criminal annals. The cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist.

“And now came the great question as to the reason why. Robbery had not been the object of the murder, for nothing was taken. Was it politics, then, or was it a woman? That was the question which confronted me. I was inclined from the first to the latter supposition. Political assassins are only too glad to do their work and to fly. This murder had, on the contrary, been done most deliberately, and the perpetrator had left his tracks all over the room, showing that he had been there all the time. It must have been a private wrong, and not a political one, which called for such a methodical revenge. When the inscription was discovered upon the wall, I was more inclined than ever to my opinion. The thing was too evidently a blind. When the ring was found, however, it settled the question. Clearly the murderer had used it to remind his victim of some dead or absent woman. It was at this point that I asked Gregson whether he had inquired in his telegram to Cleveland as to any particular point in Mr. Drebber’s former career. He answered, you remember, in the negative.