Now that Marshall Allerdyke’s mind was clearing, getting free of the first effects of the sudden shock of finding his cousin dead, doubt and uneasiness as to the whole episode were rising strongly within him.  He and James had been brought up together; they had never been apart from each other for more than a few months at a time during thirty-five years, and he flattered himself that he knew James as well as any man of James’s acquaintance.  He could not remember that his cousin had ever made any complaint of illness or indisposition; he had certainly never had any serious sickness in his life.  As to heart trouble, Allerdyke knew that a few years previous to his death, James had taken out a life-policy with a first-rate office, and had been passed as a first-class life:  he remembered, as he sat there thinking over these things, the self-satisfied grin with which James had come and told him that the examining doctor had declared him to be as sound as a bell.  It was true, of course, that disease might have set in after that—­still, it was only six weeks since he had seen James and James was then looking in a fit, healthy, hearty state.  He had gone off on one of his Russian journeys as full of life and spirits as a man could be—­and had not the hotel manager just said that he seemed full of health, full of go, at ten o’clock last night?  And yet, within a couple of hours or so—­according to what the medical men thought from their hurried examination—­this active vigorous man was dead—­swiftly and mysteriously dead.

Allerdyke felt—­felt intensely—­that there was something deeply strange in all this, and yet it was beyond him, with his limited knowledge, to account for James’s sudden death, except on the hypothesis suggested by the two doctors.  All sorts of vague, half-formed thoughts were in his mind.  Was there any person who desired James’s death?  Had any one tracked him to this place—­got rid of him by some subtle means?  Had—­

“Pshaw!” he muttered, suddenly interrupting his train of thought, and recognizing how shapeless and futile it all was.  “It just comes to this—­I’m asking myself if the poor lad was murdered!  And what have I to go on?  Naught—­naught at all!”

Nevertheless, there were papers before him which had been taken from James’s pocket; there was the little journal or diary which he always carried, and in which, to Allerdyke’s knowledge, he always jotted down a brief note of each day’s proceedings wherever he went.  He could examine these, at any rate—­they might cast some light on his cousin’s recent doings.

He began with the diary, turning over its pages until he came to the date on which James had left Bradford for St. Petersburg.  That was on March 30th.  He had travelled to the Russian capital overland—­by way of Berlin and Vilna, at each of which places he had evidently broken his journey.  From St. Petersburg he had gone on to Moscow, where he had spent the better part of a week.  All his movements were clearly set out in the brief pencilled entries in the journal.  From Moscow he had returned to St. Petersburg; there he had stayed a fortnight; thence he had journeyed to Revel, from Revel he had crossed the Baltic to Stockholm; from Stockholm he had gone across country to Christiania.  And from Christiania he had sailed for Hull to meet his death in that adjacent room where the doctors were now busied with his body.