So that conjuror's passion-flower to which I have likened this case all but folded itself up into its original pilule again. That it did not do so was due to a series of small happenings which I will now relate.

The first of these was my leaving Santon before Mrs. Cunningham arrived there. Mollie, despite her energy, did not discover her friend's whereabouts so easily as she had anticipated. It took her, to be precise, a fortnight, at the end of which time I had to leave. But so narrowly did I miss Mrs. Cunningham that I believe her train passed mine on the way.

But I did not leave Mollie without that sort of smiling salute that accompanies a fencer's "en garde." If (I told her flatly) she held herself free to accept information from me and to give nothing but pitying looks of sex-superiority in return, I for my part should also consider myself at liberty to do as I pleased should further information come to light. What I had in my mind was that if she and Audrey Cunningham were going to put their heads together in the country Rooke and I might do the same thing in town. I may say that I was quite conscious of the feebleness of my retort, and did not for a moment expect that Rooke would have anything fresh to tell me.

"Very well," Mollie laughed gayly from the platform. "But you can tell Monty from me that I'll look after this end of it. Don't tell him anything about the ring though, or you may spoil it So long, my dear—see you in September——"

And the waving hands of the Santon party slid past my carriage window.

I gave Monty her message, though strictly without prejudice to myself as its bearer. He was not caught up into any sudden transport of joy. Instead some cheerful confidence of his own seemed to envelop him.

"I fancy that will be all right now," he said.

"Do you? Well, I'm very glad. It's a great improvement on the last time."

"Oh, I've had rather a bit of luck since then," he replied.

His "bit of luck" seemed to me slender enough grounds for his confidence that all would yet be well. It appeared that he had been sent by a weekly paper down to Hounslow to make certain sketches (he was in full harness again), and there he had got into conversation with a ground official, an ex-R.A.F. man. He had rather "palled up" with this man, and had seen him several times since. Indeed, Monty was a little inclined to impart recently acquired information with regard to the organization of "dromes" and similar matters, and had quite a number of yarns that were "absolute facts" to tell. His conversation also had become noticeably slangier.

"You see," he remarked casually, "I think I'm on the track of why that pal of Philip's shot the other chap."

I found myself staring blankly at him; but, as often happens in moments of shock, I did not at first feel the full force of what he said. I interrupted him.

"I say—I hope you haven't been talking too much about that?" (I knew his weaknesses, and a perfectly open candor was one of the gravest of them.)

But "Lord, no!" he instantly reassured me. "Talking about it? Do you think I'm a——" the initials he used were those of the words "blind fiddler."

"I'm glad of that," I murmured.

And then it was that the full weight of what he had said began to sink into my mind.

"Then why did he shoot him?" I asked presently, when I was a little more master of myself. This conversation, I ought to have said, took place on the top of a bus going eastward down Piccadilly. I was on my way to the office, and I had found Monty with a finished drawing which he also was taking to Fleet Street. He looked away over the Green Park.

"Well, I'm not perfectly sure I'm right, of course," he replied, turning to me again. "In fact, I might be miles out—right off the map. But I did see him on the roof that morning, you know, and I've been trying to piece it all together again, and I must say it fits in pretty well."

"What fits in, and with what?"

He dropped his voice. "Well, you see, this fellow Smith waved his hand the way I told you—like this——" On the bus top he made that same aimless and wavering movement of his hand that I had seen him make in Esdaile's studio, that I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Chelsea public-house. "I think now he wanted the pistol back again, but of course I didn't give it him."

"What did he want it for?"

"Might have wanted to shoot himself," Monty replied.

I pondered deeply, my eyes on the passing faÇade of the Ritz. Certainly Monty, as the first on the scene that morning that now seemed such ages ago, had the right to collate his original observations with anything he might subsequently have learned, and the resulting conclusion would probably be a strong one. But that Chummy had possibly wished to shoot himself was no explanation of why he had shot Maxwell. Indeed, another explanation was far more probable. Having realized that he had in fact shot him he might merely have wished to take the shortest way out himself, and I drew Monty's attention to this.

"I'm coming to that," Monty answered. "You see this fellow Wetherhead is a jolly interesting chap. You remember the July push on the Somme? Well, he was in that—Bristol Fighter—and then he went up the line to Wipers. He told me that one time when they were in Pop—Poperinghe that is, you know, and we'd a lot of heavy guns there———" (but I think I may safely omit the rather lengthy second-hand recital of Wetherhead's movements and experiences). "Extraordinary yarns he has to tell. Did you know that a first-class pilot can drive another one down with the wash of his propeller? He can, Wetherhead says. He gets above him, and maneuvers for position, and then—I forget exactly how Wetherhead put it, but he showed me with a couple of models they have there——"

"Yes, yes, but you were going to say——"

"So I was; I know I'm rambling a bit, but it's awfully interesting, and you must meet Wetherhead. Well, when he was with the infantry (Northwold Fusiliers) he says quite a number of their fellows used to carry little doses of poison about with them, just in case. He'd heard awful yarns of the way some of these Boches used to treat their prisoners. So they had this poison to be ready for anything, like Whitaker Wright with his cigar."

"Monty, if you don't come to the point——"

"Why, I'm there now; don't have a vertical gust, old thing. Well, just in the same way Wetherhead says some of these pilots and their observers had an arrangement that if one of them got it in the neck the other one was to finish the job for him. And the other way round, of course. He and his observer—he's going to introduce me to him—they had it all fixed up, but luckily it never came to that. So it's not impossible that these two fellows were like that. What do you think? It fits in with my end all right, and you've been down there and seen Smith. What about you? I'm inclined to have a bit on it myself."

A bit on it! ... A bit! Instantly I would have had all I possessed on it. Our bus was standing at the Circus end of Lower Regent Street when Monty at last came out with it, but it had reached Waterloo Place before I next became conscious of my physical surroundings. A bit on it!... Look at Monty as I have tried to describe him to you. An unworldly and lovable and gentle sort of donkey he was in some ways; now that he had finished with his dummy trees and linoleum infantry he was apparently beginning to learn a little about other aspects of the war; and Wetherhead (whoever he was—already Monty had so crammed him down my throat that I was resolved to put the width of England between us rather than meet him) suddenly stood for the whole of the Air Force to him. But behind all his sweet credulity Monty was no fool. He was aware of his ground. He had been the first on the roof that morning. He was in the last event capable of putting two and two together and of scoring a bull. Do you know these flashes of the absolute and unalterable rightness of a thing? One of them blinded Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus; something of the same kind blinded me for the whole length of Lower Regent Street. I had no longer one single shadow of doubt. Nay, I had a certitude that even Monty didn't share. He "wasn't perfectly sure." But I——!

For what else could it have been? What else in the whole realm of man's created spirit? For what other reason could Esdaile, up to then wavering and swayed by doubts, have visited the hospital where Smith lay, have been back in his own home again within half an hour, and then have straightway borne his exonerated friend off into the midst of his family? Why, from that moment, had he immediately set about to get his own half-confidences to the rest of us back into his possession again? Why, at Santon, had my own questions been met with a silencing stare? Of all the things conceivable to have been told, could Smith have told him anything but this?

And Smith's own demeanor on that uplifted Yorkshire headland? Was not that too explained? I thought it was, and could only marvel—marvel—that not as much as the smell of the fire had passed upon him. That white and welding heat of war had not merely made his pact with Maxwell a thing to be honored in the last emergency without a further moment's thought, but it admitted no sigh nor compunction nor regret afterwards. Compunction? Sigh? Regret? For what? It had had to be done, and it had been done. As gladly would he have accompanied his friend's spirit on that last flight of all, but, that denied him, unsorrowing he remained behind, ground-officer henceforward to an angel. What more than this is death to those who for four years have been crucified all the day long? What else is life, their own life or that other-own their friend's, when it is held at this instant readiness? The coil about it all is not for them, but for us, who peer about for bullets and cartridge-cases and holes in the floor. Chummy's every breath would not have been his absolution had he not laughed with Esdaile's children and, with Joan perched on the carrier behind him, cheerfully fouled the Santon roads with the stench of his exhaust. He had no burden to assume. He had, on the contrary, an urgent task to carry on. And in the carrying-on of it he knitted his uncomprehending brows over Maxwell's Transactions and Proceedings and carried a dead man's portrait on his wrist.