For herself, she returned to her hotel to pass a sleepless night, tossing by the side of her placidly unconscious husband as she passed the tragic events of the night in review and vainly sought for some clue to the mystery.  The dreadful logic of the circumstances which pointed to suicide, hammered at her consciousness with deadening persistence, but she resolutely refused to give it entry.  Why should Robert commit suicide?  Why indeed?  It was the question which had sprung to her lips when she first heard Austin’s belief, and it was to that she now clung in the midst of her agonizing doubts, as though the mere wordless insistence in her mind made it an argument of negation which gathered force and cogency by frequent repetition.

But in the mass of teeming thoughts which crowded her brain in the silence of the small hours, she long and vainly sought for any other theory which would account for her brother’s death.  If he had been murdered, as in the first flush of her indignation she had declared, who had killed him?  Who had gone to the lonely old house in the darkness of the night, and struck him down?

It was not until the first faint glimmering of dawn was pushing its grey way through the closed shutters that there came to her the recollection of an incident of the previous day which had left a deep mark upon her mind at the time, but had since been covered over by the throng of later tremendous events.  It was the memory of that momentary glance of a pair of eyes through the slit of the door while her brother was telling of his daughter’s illegitimacy and her mother’s shame.  In the light of Robert’s subsequent death that incident appeared in a new sinister shape as a clue to the commission of the deed itself.  With the recollection of that glance there sprang almost simultaneously before her mental vision the grim and forbidding features of her brother’s servant, Thalassa.

If she had been asked, Mrs. Pendleton could not have given a satisfactory reason for linking Thalassa with the incident of the eyes, but she was a woman, and not concerned about reasons.  The two impressions had scurried swiftfooted, into her mind together, and there they remained.  She was now convinced that she had all along believed it was Thalassa she had seen watching through the door, watching and listening for some fell purpose of his own.  She knew nothing about Thalassa, but she had taken an instant dislike to him when she first saw him.  That vague dislike now assumed the form of active suspicion against him.  She determined, with the impulsiveness which was part of her temperament, to bring her suspicion before the police at the earliest possible moment.

She was essentially a woman of action, and in spite of her sleepless night she was up and dressed before her husband was awake.  He came down to breakfast to find his wife had already finished hers, and was dressed ready to go out.

“Where is Sisily?” he asked, with, a glance at the girl’s vacant place.