“Well,” that gentleman answered, “to tell you the honest truth, Miss Morse, I’m afraid I am going to disappoint you a little.  I wasn’t over well acquainted with Mr. Fynes, although a good many people seemed to fancy that we were kind of bosom friends.  That newspaper man, for instance, met me at the station and stuck to me like a leech; drove down here with me, and was willing to stand all the liquor I could drink.  Then there was a gentleman from Scotland Yard, who was in such a hurry that he came to see me in my bedroom. He had a sort of an idea that I had been brought up from infancy with Hamilton Fynes and could answer a sheaf of questions a yard long.  As soon as I got rid of him, up comes that page boy and brings your card.”

“It does seem too bad, Mr. Coulson,” Penelope declared, raising her wonderful eyes to his and smiling sympathetically.  “You have really brought it upon yourself, though, to some extent, haven’t you, by answering so many questions for this Comet man?”

“Those newspaper fellows,” Mr. Coulson remarked, “are wonders.  Before that youngster had finished with me, I began to feel that poor old Fynes and I had been like brothers all our lives.  As a matter of fact, Miss Morse, I expect you knew him at least as well as I did.”

She nodded her head thoughtfully.

“Hamilton Fynes came from the village in Massachusetts where I was brought up.  I’ve known him all my life.”

Mr. Coulson seemed a little startled.

“I didn’t understand,” he said thoughtfully, “that Fynes had any very intimate friends over this side.”

Penelope shook her head.

“I don’t mean to imply that we have been intimate lately,” she said.  “I came to Europe nine years ago, and since then, of course, I have not seen him often.  Perhaps it was the fact that he should have thought of me, and that I was actually expecting to have lunch with him today, which made me feel this thing so acutely.”

“Why, that’s quite natural,” Mr. Coulson declared, leaning back a little and crossing his legs.  “Somehow we seem to read about these things in the papers and they don’t amount to such a lot, but when you know the man and were expecting to see him, as you were, why, then it comes right home to you.  There’s something about a murder,” Mr. Coulson concluded, “which kind of takes hold of you if you’ve ever even shaken hands with either of the parties concerned in it.”

“Did you see much of the poor fellow during the voyage?” Sir Charles asked.

“No, nor any one else,” Mr. Coulson replied.  “I don’t think he was seasick, but he was miserably unsociable, and he seldom left his cabin.  I doubt whether there were half a dozen people on board who would have recognized him afterwards as a fellow-passenger.”

“He seems to have been a secretive sort of person,” Sir Charles remarked.

“He was that,” Mr. Coulson admitted.  “Never seemed to care to talk about himself or his own business.  Not that he had much to talk about,” he added reflectively.  “Dull sort of life, his.  So many hours of work, so many hours of play; so many dollars a month, and after it’s all over, so many dollars pension.  Wouldn’t suit all of us, Sir Charles, eh?”