3

You know how, sometimes, one wakes suddenly in the night with an extraordinary access of clearness of vision, so that a dozen small things which have occurred during the day and passed without making much apparent impression on one’s mind stand out sharp and defined in a row, like a troop of soldiers with fixed bayonets all pointing in one direction.  You look where they are pointing—­and behold, you see some new fact which you never saw before, and you cannot imagine how you came to have missed it.

It was in this way that I woke in the middle of the night after I had met Arthur Gideon in Hampstead.  All in a row the facts stood, pointing.

Mr. Gideon had been in the house only a few minutes before Oliver was killed.

He and Oliver hated each other privately, and had been openly quarrelling in the press for some time.  He had an intimacy with Jane which Oliver disliked.

Oliver must have been displeased at his coming home that evening with Jane.

Gideon drank.

Gideon now had something on his mind which made him even more peculiar than usual.

Jane had been very strange and secretive about his visit there on the fatal evening.

He and Oliver had probably quarrelled.

Only Jane had seen Oliver fall.

* * * * *

Had she?

* * * * *

HOW HAD THAT QUARREL ENDED?

This awful question shot into my mind like an arrow, and I sat straight up in bed with a start.

How, indeed?

I shuddered, but unflinchingly faced an awful possibility.

If it were indeed so, it was my duty to leave no stone unturned to discover and expose the awful truth.  Painful as it would be, I must not shrink.

A second terrible question came to me.  If my suspicion were correct, how much did Jane know or guess?  Jane had been most strange and reserved.  I remembered how she had run down to meet the wretched man that first morning, when we were there; I remembered her voice, rather hurried, saying, ‘Arthur!  Mother and dad are upstairs.  Come in here,’ and how she took him into the dining-room alone.

Did Jane know all?  Or did she only suspect?  I could scarcely believe that she would wish to shield her husband’s murderer, if he were that.  Yet.... why had she told me that she had seen the accident herself?  If, indeed, my terrible suspicion were justified, and if Jane was in the secret, it seemed to point to a graver condition of things than I had supposed.  No girl would lie to shield her husband’s murderer unless ... unless she was much fonder of him than a married woman has any right to be.

I resolved quickly, as I always do.  First, I must save my child from this awful man.

Secondly, I must discover the truth as expeditiously as possible, shrinking from no means.

Thirdly, if I discovered the worst, and it had to be exposed, I must see that Jane’s name was kept entirely out of it.  The journalistic squabbles and mutual antipathy of the two men would be all that would be necessary to account for their quarrel, together with Gideon’s probably intoxicated state that evening.