"Can you read the inscription on that flag, auntie?" I asked. "It's
an old photograph I picked up in the attic at The Grange, and I'd
like to know, if I could, at what place it was taken."

Aunt Emma gazed at it long and earnestly. Her colour never changed.
Then she shook her head quietly.

"I don't know the place," she said; "and I don't know the name. I
can't quite make it out. That's E, and R, and O. You see, the
letters in between might be almost anything."

I wasn't going to be put off, however, with the port thus in sight.
One fact was almost certain. Wherever that pavilion might be, the
murderer was there on the day unknown when those photo-graphs were
taken. And whatever that day might be, my father and the murderer
were there together. That brought the two into connection, and
brought me one step nearer a solution than ever the police had been;
for hitherto no one had even pretended to have the slightest clue to
the personality of the man who jumped out of the window.

I went into the library and took down the big atlas. Opening the map
of England and Wales, I began a hopeless search, county by county,
from Northumberland downward, for any town or village that would fit
these mysterious letters. It was a wild and foolish idea. In the
first place not a quarter of the villages were marked in the map;
and in the second place, my brain soon got muddled and dazed with
trying to fit in the names with the letters on the flag. Two hours
had passed away, and I'd only got as far down as Lancashire and
Durham. And, most probably even so, I would never come upon it.