“Oh, to think that I should have done that poor man such an injustice!  It is terrible, terrible!  This house has been ghastly these days.  His poor aunt knows that he is innocent—­she could never believe otherwise—­she has felt the hideous suspicion in my mind—­it has made her suffering worse—­will they ever forgive me?”

“Her joy, if I can free her nephew, will make her forget everything.  Go to her now, Miss Roemer, comfort her with the assurance that you also believe him to be innocent.  I must hasten back to G—­ and go on with this quest.”

The girl stood at the doorway shaded by the overhanging branches of two great trees, looking down the street after the slight figure of the detective.  “Oh, it is all easier to hear, hard as it is, easier now that this horrible suspicion has gone from my mind—­why did I not think of that before?”

Alone in the corner of the smoking compartment in the train to G—­, Muller arranged in his mind the facts he had already gathered.  He had questioned the servants of John Siders’ former household, had found that the dead man received very few letters, only an occasional business communication from his bank.  Of the few others, the servants knew nothing except that he had always thrown the envelopes carelessly in the waste paper basket and had never seemed to have any correspondence which he cared to conceal.  No friend from elsewhere had ever visited him in Grunau, and he had made few friends there except the Graumann family.

The facts of the case, as he knew them now, were such as to make it extremely doubtful that Graumann was the murderer.  Muller himself had been inclined to believe in the possibility of a quarrel between the two men, particularly when he had heard that Graumann himself was in love with his handsome ward.  But the second thought that came to him then, impelled by the unerring instinct that so often guided him to the truth, was the assurance that in a case of this kind, in a case of a quarrel terminating fatally, a man like Albert Graumann would be the very first to give himself up to the police and to tell the facts of the case.  Albert Graumann was a man of honour and unimpeachable integrity.  Such a man would not persist in a foolish denial of the deed which he had committed in a moment of temper.  There would be nothing to gain from it, and his own conscience would be his severest judge.  “The disorder in the room?” thought Muller.  “It’ll be too late for that now.  I suppose they have rearranged the place.  I can only go by what the local detectives have seen, by the police reports.  But I do not understand this extreme disorder.  There is no reason why there should be a struggle when the robber was armed with a pistol.  If Siders was supposed to have been interrupted when writing a letter, interrupted by a thief come with intent to steal, a thief armed with a revolver, the sight of this weapon alone would be sufficient to insure his not moving from his seat.  I can understand the open drawers and cupboard; that is explained by the thief’s hasty search for booty.  But the torn window curtain and the overturned chairs are peculiar.