hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. 'He is a dear
fellow,' he murmured. 'The best of fellows. And a terribly acute fellow. Dear
me! How curious it all is!'

CHAPTER IV: Handcuffs in the Air

A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had while yet in his twenties
achieved some reputation within the world of English art. Moreover, his
pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of leisurely but
continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative enthusiasm, were at the
bottom of it. His father's name had helped; a patrimony large enough to
relieve him of the perilous imputation of being a struggling man had certainly
not hindered. But his best aid to success had been an unconscious power of
getting himself liked. Good spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always
be popular. Trent joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him
something deeper than popularity. His judgement of persons was penetrating,
but its process was internal; no one felt on good behaviour with a man who
seemed always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of
nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost its
expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of his art and
its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a love of poetry.
At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter and adventure.

His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had won
for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a newspaper to
find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously rare in our
country--a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances were puzzling;
two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to whom an interest in
such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing discussed among his friends,
and set himself in a purposeless mood to read up the accounts given in several