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But Colwyn was not looking at her. He had opened the match-box, and was shaking out the few matches which remained in the interior. They fell, half a dozen of them, into the palm of his hand. They were wax matches, with blue heads. A sudden light leapt into the detective's eyes as he saw them a look so strange and angry that the girl, who was watching him, recoiled a little. "What is it?
Rath disappeared from the place after her daughter's arrest, when the police had decided that it was not necessary to detain her, leaving a note behind her for Miss Heredith to say that she couldn't face her after all that had happened." Colwyn did not speak immediately. He was examining the row of upper windows which looked down on the garden in which they were standing.
"You are worthier of the chief constable's compliment than I, my dear Galloway," said Colwyn genially. "Your gift of overcoming points which tell against you by ignoring them, and your careful avoidance of tell-tale inferences, would make you an ideal Crown Prosecutor." "I don't believe in inferences in crime," replied Galloway, flushing under the detective's sarcasm.
"Is that the window of the room in which Mrs. Heredith was murdered?" he asked, pointing to the first one. "Yes. It is high for a first-floor window, but there is a fall in the ground on this side of the house." Colwyn tested the strength of the Virginia creeper which grew up the wall almost to the window, and then bent down to examine the grass and earth underneath.
The innkeeper rambled on in this fashion until the entry of Charles with a table-cloth reminded him of the flight of time, and he withdrew with a halting apology for having sat there talking so long. The fat waiter saluted Colwyn with a grave bow, and proceeded to lay the cloth.
Colwyn?" said Miss Heredith with a wistful smile. "I have no doubt of it," said Colwyn with an answering smile. "A meeting with an old friend is always a good thing. Are you going with Sir Philip?" "Oh, yes. I wouldn't go without her," said the baronet, with the helpless look of senility. "You're going, aren't you, Alethea?" "Of course, Philip," was the gentle response.
There were many varieties of them: rifled harquebuses, obsolete carbines, flint-lock muskets, and modern rifles; in fact, the whole evolution of explosive weapons, from the first rude beginnings down to the breech-loader of the present day. "The Herediths have ever been a family of great warriors, Mr. Colwyn," said Miss Heredith, following his glance along the walls.
The faces of the men showed that the epithet rankled, as Colwyn intended that it should. There was a brief pause, and then another fisherman stepped forward and said: "I'm a Norfolk man, and nobbut agoin' to say I'm afeered. I'll go wi' yow, ma'aster." "If yower game, Tom, I'll go too," said another.
The inn was cut off from the village by a new accession of marsh water which had thrust a slimy tongue across the road, forming a pool in which frogs were vociferously astir. As Colwyn descended the rise the front door of the inn opened, and the gaunt figure of the innkeeper emerged, carrying some fishing lines in his hands.
Colwyn was not a stranger to marshlands. He had waded knee-deep from dawn to dusk through Irish bogs after wild geese; he had followed the migratory seafowl of Finland, Russia and Serbia into their Scottish breeding haunts, and he had once tried to keep pace with the sweep of the Bore over the Solway Marshes, but he had never undertaken a task so difficult as following this girl across a Norfolk marshland.
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