427 Park Lane. The youth moved in the best society--had, so far as was
known, no enemies and no particular vices. He had been engaged to Miss
Edith Woodley, of Carstairs, but the engagement had been broken off by
mutual consent some months before, and there was no sign that it had
left any very profound feeling behind it. For the rest {sic} the man's
life moved in a narrow and conventional circle, for his habits were
quiet and his nature unemotional. Yet it was upon this easy-going young
aristocrat that death came, in most strange and unexpected form, between
the hours of ten and eleven-twenty on the night of March 30, 1894.

Ronald Adair was fond of cards--playing continually, but never for such
stakes as would hurt him. He was a member of the Baldwin, the Cavendish,
and the Bagatelle card clubs. It was shown that, after dinner on the day
of his death, he had played a rubber of whist at the latter club. He had
also played there in the afternoon. The evidence of those who had played
with him--Mr. Murray, Sir John Hardy, and Colonel Moran--showed that
the game was whist, and that there was a fairly equal fall of the cards.
Adair might have lost five pounds, but not more. His fortune was a
considerable one, and such a loss could not in any way affect him. He
had played nearly every day at one club or other, but he was a cautious
player, and usually rose a winner. It came out in evidence that, in
partnership with Colonel Moran, he had actually won as much as four
hundred and twenty pounds in a sitting, some weeks before, from Godfrey
Milner and Lord Balmoral. So much for his recent history as it came out
at the inquest.

On the evening of the crime, he returned from the club exactly at ten.
His mother and sister were out spending the evening with a relation. The
servant deposed that she heard him enter the front room on the second
floor, generally used as his sitting-room. She had lit a fire there, and