Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her brother’s disappearance with a somber stoicism in which there was, perhaps, more paralysis than pain; but when the other question came to the surface she was both agitated and angry.

“We don’t want to jump to any conclusions about anybody,” Brain was saying in his staccato style.  “But we should like to know a little more about Mr. Crane.  Nobody seems to know much about him, or where he comes from.  And it seems a sort of coincidence that yesterday he actually crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and could have stuck him, too, since he showed himself the better swordsman.  Of course, that may be an accident and couldn’t possibly be called a case against anybody; but then we haven’t the means to make a real case against anybody.  Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur sleuthhounds.”

“And I think you’re a pack of snobs,” said Juliet.  “Because Mr. Crane is a genius who’s made his own way, you try to suggest he’s a murderer without daring to say so.  Because he wore a toy sword and happened to know how to use it, you want us to believe he used it like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world.  And because he could have hit my brother and didn’t, you deduce that he did.  That’s the sort of way you argue.  And as for his having disappeared, you’re wrong in that as you are in everything else, for here he comes.”

And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious Robin Hood slowly detached itself from the gray background of the trees, and came toward them as she spoke.

He approached the group slowly, but with composure; but he was decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain and Fisher had already taken in one detail of the green-clad figure more clearly than all the rest.  The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword was gone.

Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did not follow up the question thus suggested; but, while retaining an air of leading the inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the subject.

“Now we’re all assembled,” he observed, quietly, “there is a question I want to ask to begin with.  Did anybody here actually see Lord Bulmer this morning?”

Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the circle of faces till he came to Juliet’s; then he compressed his lips a little and said: 

“Yes, I saw him.”

“Was he alive and well?” asked Brain, quickly.  “How was he dressed?”

“He appeared exceedingly well,” replied Crane, with a curious intonation.  “He was dressed as he was yesterday, in that purple costume copied from the portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth century.  He had his skates in his hand.”

“And his sword at his side, I suppose,” added the questioner.  “Where is your own sword, Mr. Crane?”

“I threw it away.”

In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many minds became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.