past--and whom Ransford had no desire to meet again?

4. Did Ransford meet him--in the Cathedral?

5. Was it Ransford who flung him to his death down
St. Wrytha's Stair?

6. Was that the real reason of the agitation in which
he, Bryce, had found Ransford a few moments after
the discovery of the body?

There was plenty of time before him for the due solution of
these mysteries, reflected Bryce--and for solving another
problem which might possibly have some relationship to them
--that of the exact connection between Ransford and his two
wards. Bryce, in telling Ransford that morning of what was
being said amongst the tea-table circles of the old cathedral
city, had purposely only told him half a tale. He knew, and
had known for months, that the society of the Close was
greatly exercised over the position of the Ransford menage.
Ransford, a bachelor, a well-preserved, active, alert man who
was certainly of no more than middle age and did not look his
years, had come to Wrychester only a few years previously, and
had never shown any signs of forsaking his single state. No
one had ever heard him mention his family or relations; then,
suddenly, without warning, he had brought into his house Mary
Bewery, a handsome young woman of nineteen, who was said to
have only just left school, and her brother Richard, then a
boy of sixteen, who had certainly been at a public school of
repute and was entered at the famous Dean's School of