“Is that what you think?” said Dr. Ravenshaw.

“I see no other way of looking at it,” returned Austin rapidly.  “The door was locked on the inside, and the room couldn’t be reached from the window.  This house stands almost on the edge of the cliff, which is nearly two hundred feet high.  My feeling is that after my poor brother shot himself he remembered in his dying moments that his will was hidden in the clock-case and might not be found.  He made a desperate effort to reach it and dragged it down as he fell.”

The doctor listened attentively to this imaginary picture of Robert Turold’s last moments.

“But why should he destroy himself?” he queried.

“Grief and remorse.  Do you remember the disclosure he made to us this afternoon?  It is a matter which might well have preyed upon his mind.”

“I see,” said the other thoughtfully.  “Yes, perhaps you may be right.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a loud knocking downstairs.

“That must be the police,” observed Dr. Ravenshaw.  “Let us go down.”

CHAPTER X

“Why should Robert commit suicide?”

That was the burden of Mrs. Pendleton’s cry, then and afterwards.  There was an angry scene in the old cliff house between brother and sister before the events of that night were concluded.  She utterly refused to accept Austin’s theory that their brother, with his own hand, had discharged the revolver bullet which had put an end to his life and ambitions.  Sitting bolt upright in indignant amazement, she rejected the idea in the sharpest scorn.  It was nothing to her that the police sergeant from the churchtown shared her brother’s view, and that Dr. Ravenshaw was passively acquiescent.  She brushed aside the plausible web of circumstances with the impatient hand of an angry woman.  They might talk till Doomsday, but they wouldn’t convince her that Robert, of all men, had done anything so disgraceful as take his own life.  Arguments and events, the locked door and the inaccessible windows—­pathetically masculine insistence on mere details—­were wasted on her.  The marshalled array of facts made not the slightest impression on her firm belief that Robert had not shot himself.

Shaking a large finger of angry import at Austin, and addressing herself to him alone, she had said—­

“Robert has been murdered, Austin, I feel sure.  I don’t care what you say, but if there’s law in England I’ll have his murderer discovered.”

And with that conclusion she had indignantly left the house with her husband, leaving her brother to walk back to his lodgings at the churchtown in moody solitude across the rainy darkness of the moors.