’And yet it must be admitted that his conduct is not free of blame.  He contracts a sudden intimacy with the acknowledged culprit, whom he does not seem to have known before.  He meets her by night, corresponds with her.  Who and what is this woman?  I think we could not be far wrong in guessing some very old flame of Lord Pharanx’s of Theatre des Varietes type, whom he has supported for years, and from whom, hearing some story to her discredit, he threatens to withdraw his supplies.  However that be, Randolph writes to Cibras—­a violent woman, a woman of lawless passions—­assuring her that in four or five days she will be excluded from the will of his father; and in four or five days Cibras plunges a knife into his father’s bosom.  It is a perfectly natural sequence—­though, of course, the intention to produce by his words the actual effect produced might have been absent; indeed, the letter of Lord Pharanx himself, had it been received, would have tended to produce that very effect; for it not only gives an excellent opportunity for converting into action those evil thoughts which Randolph (thoughtlessly or guiltily) has instilled, but it further tends to rouse her passions by cutting off from her all hopes of favour.  If we presume, then, as is only natural, that there was no such intention on the part of the earl, we may make the same presumption in the case of the son.  Cibras, however, never receives the earl’s letter:  on the morning of the same day she goes away to Bath, with the double object, I suppose, of purchasing a weapon, and creating an impression that she has left the country.  How then does she know the exact locale of Lord Pharanx’s room?  It is in an unusual part of the mansion, she is unacquainted with any of the servants, a stranger to the district.  Can it be possible that Randolph had told her?  And here again, even in that case, you must bear in mind that Lord Pharanx also told her in his note, and you must recognise the possibility of the absence of evil intention on the part of the son.  Indeed, I may go further and show you that in all but every instance in which his actions are in themselves outre, suspicious, they are rendered, not less outre, but less suspicious, by the fact that Lord Pharanx himself knew of them, shared in them.  There was the cruel barbing of that balcony window; about it the crudest thinker would argue thus to himself:  “Randolph practically incites Maude Cibras to murder his father on the 5th, and on the 6th he has that window so altered in order that, should she act on his suggestion, she will be caught on attempting to leave the room, while he himself, the actual culprit being discovered en flagrant delit, will escape every shadow of suspicion.”  But, on the other hand, we know that the alteration was made with Lord Pharanx’s consent, most likely on his initiative—­for he leaves his favoured room during a whole day for that very purpose.  So with the letter to Cibras