To tell the truth, that ring was beginning to worry me a little. I don't mean my possession of it, since I had no intention of pawning it, and was prepared to hand it over to its rightful owner as soon as I felt that that course would not do more harm than good. My concern was about the severed relation of which it had been a symbol. I wondered whether I was not perhaps a little excessively delicate on Monty's behalf. If my eyes, wandering round his tidy room, had encountered a copy of the Era or been given any other excuse for introducing Audrey Cunningham's name, I think that after all I should have risked it. But "When in doubt cut it out" is a safe motto, and I remained silent.

I had had, however, an idea. Mrs. Cunningham might be "fed" with men, but it was not likely that she had broken off her engagement without saying something to Mollie Esdaile about it. What was the harm in writing to Mollie, not necessarily mentioning the ring, but asking for her version of whatever had happened?

The more I thought of it the more I liked the idea. Match-making is rather out of my line, but I am not entirely indifferent to the happiness of my friends, and I had not forgotten poor Monty's anguished cry of "Dawdy! Dawdy!" the last time I had visited him in Jubilee Place. I do not call it match-making merely to inquire whether a possible obstacle may not be removed. If it was the Case's doing, the Case's solution ought to get matters right again. A little prematurely, perhaps, I was growing to the belief that the question was not whether the Case would settle itself, but how.

Before I left him, which I did very shortly afterwards, I had determined to write to Mollie. I did so indeed that very night. I did not mention the ring. I simply gave her a faithful picture of the two Montys, the first one so distressing, and the second so enheartening, and asked her what about the other side of the affair.

It was nearly a week before I received her reply, which, when it did come, contained that invitation to spend a month at Santon that I have already anticipated in this story. It was a curious letter in some ways. Parts of it, even certain parts that touched Audrey Cunningham directly, were as free and frank as I have always found Mollie to be; but other parts were noticeably the other way. For example, she wrote:—

"The engagement is certainly 'off' as far as I can make out, and whether there's any chance of their coming together again I really can't say. She gave me to understand not, but it's three weeks since she wrote, and Philip hasn't heard from Monty at all."

That seemed frank enough, but, on the very same page, was this:—

"I don't think it's absolutely impossible they'll make it up. Perhaps I oughtn't to say this, and I'd rather not give you my reason, but I don't think it's altogether out of the question. But the circumstances are so peculiar. Everything's really most awfully mixed, and I don't want to raise even my own hopes. I can't see why you didn't ask Monty," etc., etc.

"I'd rather not give you my reason"—"the circumstances are peculiar"—"things are most awfully mixed"—those were the dubious parts. I was certain that she, as well as Philip, was holding something back. The letter, in fact, seemed to confirm the opinion I had formed on finding that ring so fantastically embedded in the studio floor, namely, that before shaking the dust of Lennox Street from her feet Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery, which she had since shared with Mollie and Mollie now declined to share with me. In this, as you will see, I was partly right and partly wrong.

In the meantime, suppression for suppression. I had not been candid either. I had said nothing about finding the ring. Perhaps after all my letter had got the answer it deserved.

But the invitation to visit the Esdailes at Santon tempted me extremely. Quite apart from the Case, I hungered and thirsted for the air of my own country. And there was the Case itself. Now that, with Glenfield's countenance, Westbury's deterioration and the merely admonitory attitude of Police Inspector Webster, it was becoming almost a jocund affair, its center of gravity had shifted away from London to the country. It was in the country that our young slayer was demonstrating murder to be the way of happiness. It was in the country that Philip Esdaile was apparently machinating to get the half-escaped strings back into his own controlling fingers again. And it was from the country that Mollie was now writing her interesting blend of candor and reserve.

And what was there left of much interest in London? It seemed to me very little. In Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Temple the lawyers were no doubt busily getting up their briefs for Scepter Assurance Corporation v. Aiglon Aviation Company, but I could depend on Mackwith to keep me posted on all that. In the columns of the Circus I had awakened quite a lively, if somewhat rambling, correspondence, in which the name of Charles Valentine Smith had not definitely appeared, but for the appearance of which, if the Case demanded it, I could arrange at a moment's notice. All the life and interest seemed to have passed out of these things. That is the worst of this intangible operation of Publicity—it possesses you in spurts, with gaps of complete listlessness. It is super-heated, and at a change of atmosphere condenses into a few chill drops. Then, when you have brought it up to the proper state of rarefaction again, you find that the popular interest has shifted leagues away. Already my correspondence showed signs of becoming as much beside the mark as had that nine-days'-wonder that one morning had filled Lennox Street with a gaping crowd and had set mysterious rumors circulating with the morning milk-carts. Publicity, like lightning, never strikes in the same place twice. Nobody now cared a rap whether an aeroplane had crashed in Chelsea on a May morning months ago, nor how, nor why. Nobody was going to drag the bed of the Thames for the identification-number of a useless Webley and Scott pistol. A spent bullet, flying in at an open window, had not killed an Estate Agent's child, and Inspector Webster had far too much work on his hands to dream of applying to the Home Secretary through the proper channels for an Exhumation Order. Cases left long enough unanswered answer themselves. The scene changes, the circumstances alter, the world moves on.

I too felt like moving on. Glenfield had offered me a holiday, and I had my book to finish. As well finish it at Santon as anywhere else. Santon—its cornfields and skies, the cliffs for ever a-racket with the seabirds' clamor, the dappled fawn of its sands! I was there in my heart already.

I wrote to Mollie that very night.