Morriston pointed to a chair, but his visitor, in his preoccupation, seemed to take no notice of the gesture, continuing to stand restlessly, in an attitude of strained attention.

The other three men had seated themselves.  Morriston without further preface related the story of the locked door in the tower and of the subsequent discovery when it had been opened.  Henshaw heard him to the end in what seemed a mood of hardly restrained, somewhat resentful impatience.

“I don’t understand it at all,” he said when the story was finished.

“Nor do any of us,” Morriston returned promptly.  “The whole affair is as mysterious as it is lamentable.  Still it appears to be clearly a case of suicide.”

“Suicide!” Henshaw echoed with a certain scornful incredulity.  “Why suicide?  In connexion with my brother the idea seems utterly preposterous.”

“The door locked on the inside,” Morriston suggested.

“That, I grant you, is at first sight mysterious enough,” Henshaw returned, his keen eyes fixed on Morriston.  “But even that does not reconcile me to the monstrous improbability of my brother, Clement, taking his own life.  I knew him too well to admit that.”

“Unfortunately,” Morriston replied, sympathetically restraining any approach to an argumentative tone, “your brother was practically a stranger to me, and to us all.  My friends here, Captain Kelson and Mr. Gifford, met him casually at the railway station and drove with him to the Golden Lion in the town, where they all put up.”

Henshaw’s sharp scrutiny was immediately transferred from Morriston to his companions.

“Can you, gentlemen, throw any light on the matter?” he asked sharply.

“None at all, I am sorry to say,” Kelson answered readily.  “I may as well tell you how our very slight acquaintance with him came about.”

“If you please,” Henshaw responded, in a tone more of command than request.

Kelson, naturally ignoring his questioner’s slightly offensive manner, thereupon related the circumstances of the encounter at the station-yard and of the subsequent drive to the town, merely softening the detail of their preliminary altercation.  Henshaw listened alertly intent, it seemed, to seize upon any point which did not satisfy him.

“That was all you saw of my unfortunate brother?” he demanded at the end.

“We saw him for a few moments in the hall of the hotel just as we were starting,” Kelson answered.

“You drove here together?  No?”

“No; your brother took an hotel carriage, and I drove in my own trap.”

“With Mr. ——?” he indicated Gifford, who up to this point had not spoken.

“No,” Gifford answered.  “I came on later.  A suit-case with my evening things had gone astray—­been carried on in the train, and I had to wait till it was returned.”

Henshaw stared at him for a moment sharply as though the statement had about it something vaguely suspicious, seemed about to put another question, checked himself, and turned about with a gesture of perplexity.