"I thought as much," said Dunn. "May I ask you another question?"

She nodded.

"May I smoke?"

She nodded again with a touch of impatience.

He took a cigarette from his pocket and put it in his mouth and
lighted a match, but the match, when he had lighted it, he used to
put light to a scrap of folded paper with writing on it, like a note.

This piece of paper he used to light his cigarette with and when he
had done so he watched the paper burn to an ash, not dropping it to
the ground till the little flame stung his fingers.

The ash that had fallen he ground into the path where they stood
with the heel of his boot.

"What have you burned there?" she asked, as if she suspected it was
something of importance he had destroyed.

In fact it was the note that had fallen from dead John Clive's hand
wherein Ella had asked him to meet her at the oak where he had met
his death.

That bit of paper would have been enough, Dunn thought, to place a
harsh hempen noose about the soft white throat he watched where the
little pulse still fluttered up and down. But now it was burnt and