“The day he went to Smithtown and talked to the detective,” the butler quavered.

“You can understand his reflections,” Paredes mused.  “Money was his god.  He distrusted and hated his own flesh and blood because he thought they coveted it.  He was prepared to punish them by leaving it to a public charity.  Now arises this apparition from the past with no claim in a court of law, with an intention simply to ask, and, in case of a refusal, to punish.  The conclusion reached by that selfish and merciless mind was inevitable.  He probably knew nothing whatever about Maria.  If all the world thought his brother dead, his brother’s murder now wouldn’t alter anything.  I’ll wager, Doctor, that at that time he talked over wounds at the base of the brain with you.”

The doctor moved restlessly.

“Yes.  But he was very superstitious.  We talked about it in connection with his ancestors who had died of such wounds in that room.”

“Everything was ready when he made the rendezvous here,” Paredes went on.  “He expected to have Bobby at hand in case his plan failed and he had to defend himself.  But Maria had made sure that there should be no help for him.  When the man came did you take him upstairs, Jenkins?”

“No, sir.  I watched that Miss Katherine didn’t leave the library, but I think she must have caught Mr. Silas in the upper hall after he had pretended to give up and had persuaded his brother to spend the night.”

Paredes smiled whimsically.  He took two faded photographs from his pocket.  They were of young men, after the fashion of Blackburns, remarkably alike even without the gray, obliterating marks of old age.

“I found these in the family album,” he said.

“We should have known the difference just the same,” the doctor grumbled.  “Why didn’t we know the difference?”

“I’ve complained often enough,” Paredes smiled, “of the necessity of using candles in this house.  There was never more than one candle in the old bedroom.  There were only two when we looked at the murdered man in his coffin.  And in death there are no familiar facial expressions, no eccentricities of speech.  So you can imagine my feelings when I tried to picture the drama that had gone on in that room.  You can imagine poor Maria’s.  Which one?  And Maria didn’t know about the panel, or the use of Miss Katherine’s hat-pin, or the handkerchief.  All of those details indicated Silas Blackburn.”

“How could my handkerchief indicate anything of the kind?” Bobby asked, “How did it come there?”

“What,” Paredes said, “is the commonest form of borrowing in the world, particularly in a climate where people have frequent colds?  I found a number of your handkerchiefs in your grandfather’s bureau.  The handkerchief furnished me with an important clue.  It explains, I think, Jenkins will tell you, the moving of the body.  It was obviously the cause of Howells’s death.”