After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden access of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the police naturally began to inquire for him.  It is a way they have; the police are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into the question of motives.  They are but poor casuists.  A murder is for them a murder, and a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit to divide and distinguish between case and case with Hilda Wade’s analytical accuracy.

As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel’s permitted me, on the evening of the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet’s, Le Geyt’s sister.  I had been detained at the hospital for some hours, however, watching a critical case; and by the time I reached Great Stanhope Street I found Hilda Wade, in her nurse’s dress, there before me.  Sebastian, it seemed, had given her leave out for the evening.  She was a supernumerary nurse, attached to his own observation-cots as special attendant for scientific purposes, and she could generally get an hour or so whenever she required it.

Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I arrived; but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her red eyes and compose herself a little before the strain of meeting me; so I had the opportunity for a few words alone first with my prophetic companion.

“You said just now at Nathaniel’s,” I burst out, “that Le Geyt would not be hanged:  he would commit suicide.  What did you mean by that?  What reason had you for thinking so?”

Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers.  She was deeply moved.  “Well, consider his family history,” she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal.  “Heredity counts. . . .  And after such a disaster!”

She said “disaster,” not “crime”; I noted mentally the reservation implied in the word.

“Heredity counts,” I answered.  “Oh, yes.  It counts much.  But what about Le Geyt’s family history?” I could not recall any instance of suicide among his forbears.

“Well—­his mother’s father was General Faskally, you know,” she replied, after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner.  “Mr. Le Geyt is General Faskally’s eldest grandson.”

“Exactly,” I broke in, with a man’s desire for solid fact in place of vague intuition.  “But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it.”

“The General was killed in India during the Mutiny.”

“I remember, of course—­killed, bravely fighting.”

“Yes; but it was on a forlorn hope, for which he volunteered, and in the course of which he is said to have walked straight into an almost obvious ambuscade of the enemy’s.”

“Now, my dear Miss Wade”—­I always dropped the title of “Nurse,” by request, when once we were well clear of Nathaniel’s,—­“I have every confidence, you are aware, in your memory and your insight; but I do confess I fail to see what bearing this incident can have on poor Hugo’s chances of being hanged or committing suicide.”