corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house; a
servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier hours of
the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she wondered what
it could be like to be as rich as the master.

He examined the place carefully and ransacked the hut within, but he could
note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where the body had
lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he searched the
ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was fruitless.

It was interrupted by the sound--the first he had heard from the house--of the
closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and stepped to the edge
of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from the house in the direction
of the great gate.

At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face was
almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's face.
There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their tale of
strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other, Trent noted
with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe, strong figure. In his
carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it; in his handsome, regular
features; in his short, smooth, yellow hair; and in his voice as he addressed
Trent, the influence of a special sort of training was confessed. 'Oxford was
your playground, I think, my young friend,' said Trent to himself.

'If you are Mr. Trent,' said the young man pleasantly, 'you are expected. Mr.
Cupples telephoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe.'

'You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe,' said Trent. He was much