During the week which preceded the adjourned inquest on William Towers, Bertram Standon held his journalistic hand; and--Fleet Street being momentarily occupied with the controversy of "Submarines v. Battleships"--no further details of the tragedy became available.

Reperusing the week-end papers of an evening, it seemed to Ronnie that the case against the woman--whose likeness to Aliette waned and waned the more one scrutinized her photograph--looked black enough. Apparently she had shot her husband during an altercation in another man's room. The other man, a sailor who had lost both his arms in the war, was her cousin, and--the reports suggested--her lover.

All the same, the "vulgar murder-case" continued to excite both his personalities: the magisterial Cavendish because of a curious inward conviction--the conviction he had voiced to Wilberforce--that "the woman was no murderess": and the imaginative Wixton because if the coroner's jury found her guilty he might at last get his chance--slim though that chance appeared--of a big forensic victory.

Night after night, therefore, Caroline Staley, who, in the absence of her mistress, had relapsed into the perfect bachelor housekeeper, completely idle from ten to four, and completely assiduous for the rest of the time, left her master at work in the little sitting-room of the "ridiculous flat," studying--with his mother's own concentration--first in his red "Gibson and Weldon," and thereafter at length, the reports of Rex v. Lesbini, of Rex v. Simpson, of Rex v. Greening (in which it is definitely held that, though the sight of adultery committed with his wife gives sufficient provocation for a husband to plead manslaughter, the major accusation must hold good if the woman be only mistress of the accused), and of any other case that might, by the vaguest possibility, have some bearing on the problematic defense of Lucy Towers.