“I thought it a pity to waste a big envelope,” she observed, “so I have done up the newspaper and my note to your mother into a roll.  Will you please ask your mother to put it back exactly as it is now—­with the india-rubber band round it?  These bands have become so very expensive.  She need not send it back.  I will call for it to-morrow morning about twelve.  Mind you give it to her at once, Timmy.  I don’t want to have a thing like that left lying about.”

Timmy slipped into Old Place by a back way often used by the young people, for it was opposite a garden door set in the high brick wall which gave on to one of the by-ways of the village.

But instead of seeking out his mother, as he ought at once to have done, he went upstairs and so into what had been the day nursery.  There he locked the door, and having first put Nanna’s Bible on the big, round table, at which as a baby boy he had always sat in his high chair, he went over to the corner where Josephine was peacefully reposing with her kittens, and sat down on the floor by the cat’s basket.

Very carefully he then slipped the india-rubber band off the roll of brown paper which had been confided to him by Miss Pendarth.  He spread out the sheet of newspaper, putting aside the brown paper in which it had been rolled, as also Miss Pendarth’s open letter to his mother.  And then, with one hand resting on his cat’s soft, furry neck, he read through the long account of the inquest held on Colonel Crofton’s death.  As he worked laboriously down the long columns, Timmy’s freckled forehead became wrinkled, for, try as he might, he could not make out what it was all about.  The only part he thoroughly understood was the description of Colonel Crofton’s last hours; the agony the dying man had endured, the efforts made by the doctor, not only to save his life, but to force him to say how the virulent poison had got into his system—­all became vividly present to the boy.

Timmy felt vexed when he realised, as he could not help doing, that Mrs. Crofton had looked very pretty when she was giving evidence at the inquest; in fact, the descriptive reporter had called her “the dead man’s beautiful young widow.”

And then, all at once, he bethought himself of Miss Pendarth’s letter to his mother.

Now Timmy was well aware that it is not an honourable thing to read other people’s letters; on the other hand, his mother always left Miss Pendarth’s notes lying about on her writing table, and more than once she had exclaimed:  “Betty?  Do read that note, and tell me what’s in it!”

And so, after a short conflict between principle and curiosity, in which curiosity won, he began to read the letter.  As he did so, he realised that it formed a key to the newspaper report he had just read, for Miss Pendarth’s letter ran: 

  My dear Janet,

  I am longing to talk over the enclosed with you.  I was lately in Essex,
  and when we meet I will tell you all that was said and suspected there
  at the time of Colonel Crofton’s death.