“She talked with you, then?”

“Na, she spak just three words when she handed in the money for her ticket:  ‘One—­second-class—­through.’”

“Would you recognize her voice again if you should hear it?”

“Ay, that I should.”

“How was this young woman dressed?”

“She wore a lang, black tweed cloak wi’ a hood till it, and a dark vail.”

A few more questions were asked, but as nothing new was elicited the witness was permitted to retire.

Other witnesses were examined, and old witnesses were recalled hour after hour and day after day, without effect.  No new light was thrown upon the mystery.

No one, except Cuddie McGill, the saddler’s apprentice, could be found who had seen the suspicious man and woman lurking under the balcony.

Certainly Lord Arondelle remembered the “dream” Miss Levison had told him of the two persons whom she mistook to be himself and Rose Cameron talking together under her window.  But Miss Levison was so far incapable of giving evidence as to be lying at the point of death with brain fever.  So it would have been worse than useless to have spoken of her dream, or supposed dream.

The coroner’s inquest sat several days without arriving at any definite conclusion.

The most plausible theory of the murder seemed to be that a robbery had been planned between the valet and certain unknown confederates, who had all been tempted by the great treasures known to be in the castle that night in the form of costly bridal presents; that no murder was at first intended; that the confederates had been secretly admitted to the castle through the connivance of the valet; that the strong guard placed over the treasures in the lighted drawing-room had saved them from robbery; that the robbers, disappointed of their first expectations, next went, with the farther connivance of the valet, to the bedchamber of Sir Lemuel Levison, for the purpose of emptying his strong box; that being detected in their criminal designs by the wakeful banker, they had silenced him by one fatal blow on the head; that they had then accomplished the robbery of the strong box, and of the person of the deceased banker; and had been secretly let out of the castle by the valet.

Finally, it was thought that the man and the woman discovered under the balcony by Cuddie McGill on the night of the murder, were confederates in the crime, and the woman was the midnight passenger to whom Donald McNeil sold the second-class railway ticket to London, and that the heavy black bag she carried contained the booty taken from the castle.

On the evening of the third day of the unsatisfactory inquest a verdict was returned to this effect.

That the deceased Sir Lemuel Levison, Knight, had come to his death by a blow from a heavy bronze statuette held in the hands of some person unknown to the jury.  And that Peters, the valet of the deceased banker, was accessory to the murder.