“I have come after you to tell you something,” Charles said abruptly, “something that you ought to know.  You were questioning my father about the facts of this case—­about my uncle’s death.  You did not learn anything from him, but I can tell you my cousin Sisily is innocent.”

He brought out these words with a breathlessness which may have been the result of his haste.  The calmness of the lawyer’s reply was in marked contrast.

“Is this merely an assertion, Mr. Turold?”

“It is more than an assertion.  I can prove it to you.”

Mr. Brimsdown was startled.  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“If you will come to Flint House I will show you.”

Mr. Brimsdown stroked the cautious chin of an old man plunged into a situation which he could not fathom.  “Would it not be better to consult the police first?” he temporized.

“The police are now searching the country for Sisily, and there is no time to be lost.”

There was something so profoundly unhappy in his appearance that pity stirred in the lawyer’s heart.  “Very well,” he said, with another look at the lowering sky, “let us go.”

That afternoon remained with the lawyer as another unforgettable memory.  It was all of a piece, sombre, yet of a sharp-edged vividness:  the desolation of the moors, the sting of the rain, the clamour of the sea, the seabirds soaring slowly with harsh cries.  Then they stood, the pair of them, in Robert Turold’s bedroom, looking down on the dead man, swathed in his graveclothes, with a wreath of flowers from Mrs. Pendleton on his breast.  Removing this symbol of human pretense against the reality of things, Charles Turold bared the arm of the corpse, and pointing to it exclaimed—­

“Could those marks have been made by Sisily?”

In his examination of the marks thus revealed to him, Mr. Brimsdown had the strange feeling that their existence was, in some way, the justification of the dead man’s summons to him.

“Do you know how these marks were made?” he said, turning to Charles.

“I do not.  But I do know that they prove that Sisily is innocent.”

Charles Turold spoke defiantly, but there was a slight note of interrogation in his voice which the lawyer chose to ignore.

“They were made by a man’s hand,” the young man persisted, looking earnestly at him.

“Do the police know of them?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

Another question was in Mr. Brimsdown’s mind, but the young man’s haggard face, the mingled misery and expectation of his glance, checked the utterance of it.  He had the idea that Charles’s manner suggested something more—­some revelation yet to come.  But the young man did not speak.

“Is this all you wanted to show me?” Mr. Brimsdown hinted.

“Is it not enough?”

“I do not see that it throws any light on Miss Turold’s disappearance.  Can you explain that?”