“Did you ever read the report of the inquest on Colonel Crofton?” asked Miss Pendarth meaningly.

“I hadn’t the chance.  I was still in Australia,” he said shortly.

“If you’ll wait a moment I’ll bring it to you,” was the, to him, astonishing reply.

Miss Pendarth walked off with her quick, light footsteps towards the house, and Radmore, gazing after her, told himself that she was indeed a strange woman.  In some ways he had liked her far better to-day than he had ever liked her before, but the low, silly bit of gossip she had just told him filled him with disgust.

Very soon she was back, holding in her hand a newspaper.

An inquest of the kind that was held on Colonel Crofton is a godsend to any local sheet, and Radmore saw at a glance that this county paper had made the most of it.

“Will you read it here, if you’re not in a hurry?  I don’t want it taken away; so while you’re reading it, I’ll go and do some potting over there.”

She disappeared into a glass-house built across a corner of her garden, and he settled down to read the long newspaper columns.

Soon his feeling quickened into intense interest.  The local Essex reporter had a turn for descriptive writing, and, as he read, Godfrey Radmore saw the scene described rise vividly before him.  He seemed to visualise the intensely crowded little court-house, the kindly coroner, the twelve good men and true, and the motley gathering of small town and country folk drawn together in the hope of hearing something startling.

Yet the facts were simple enough.  Colonel Crofton had died from either an accidental, or a deliberate, over-dose of strychnine.  And his death had been a terrible one.

The outstanding points of interrogation were:  Had he consciously added to a tonic which he was taking an ounce or more of the deadly drug?  Or, as some people were inclined to believe, had the local chemist by some mistake or gross piece of carelessness, put a murderous amount of strychnine into a mixture which had been prescribed for his customer about a fortnight before?

But for the fact that a bottle of nux vomica had been actually found on the ledge of the dead man’s dressing-room window, it would have gone hard with the chemist.  But there the bottle had been found, and in her evidence, evidently given very clearly and simply, Mrs. Crofton had explained that, during the war, while in Egypt, she had palpitations of the heart, and so many drops of diluted strychnine had been ordered her.

When asked why there was so large a bottle full of the deadly stuff, she had answered that it had come from the Army Stores, where they always did things in a big and generous way.  At that there had been laughter in Court.

Mrs. Crofton had further explained that, as a matter of fact, she had brought the bottle back to England without really knowing that she had done so; and that she had never given it a thought till it had been found, as described, after her husband’s death, by the doctor who had been called in to attend Colonel Crofton in his agonizing seizure.