have had valuable securities, papers relating to designs, papers
containing secrets of great moment; he was interested, for example, in
several patents--he might have had documents pertinent to some affair of
such importance that ill-disposed folk, eager to seize them, might have
murdered him in order to gain possession of them. There were many
possibilities, and there was always--to Allerdyke's mind--the
improbability that James had died through sudden illness.

Now that Marshall Allerdyke's mind was clearing, getting free of the
first effects of the sudden shock of finding his cousin dead, doubt and
uneasiness as to the whole episode were rising strongly within him. He
and James had been brought up together; they had never been apart from
each other for more than a few months at a time during thirty-five years,
and he flattered himself that he knew James as well as any man of James's
acquaintance. He could not remember that his cousin had ever made any
complaint of illness or indisposition; he had certainly never had any
serious sickness in his life. As to heart trouble, Allerdyke knew that a
few years previous to his death, James had taken out a life-policy with a
first-rate office, and had been passed as a first-class life: he
remembered, as he sat there thinking over these things, the
self-satisfied grin with which James had come and told him that the
examining doctor had declared him to be as sound as a bell. It was true,
of course, that disease might have set in after that--still, it was only
six weeks since he had seen James and James was then looking in a fit,
healthy, hearty state. He had gone off on one of his Russian journeys as
full of life and spirits as a man could be--and had not the hotel
manager just said that he seemed full of health, full of go, at ten
o'clock last night? And yet, within a couple of hours or so--according to
what the medical men thought from their hurried examination--this active
vigorous man was dead--swiftly and mysteriously dead.