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Fortune seemed inclined to favour us. About the usual time the blind was gently raised, and very soon afterwards there came round the corner the figure of a man. We entered the street ourselves a few seconds later, and it seemed likely that, as we had planned, we should come face to face with him under the gaslight. He walked towards us, stooping and with bent head. We expected him to pass the house by. To our surprise he stopped when he came to it, and pushed open the gate. In another moment we should have lost all chance of seeing anything more of him except his bent back. With a couple of strides my friend was behind him. He laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and forced him to turn round. It was an old, wrinkled face with gentle, rather watery eyes.

We were both so taken aback that for a moment we could say nothing. My friend stammered out an apology about having mistaken the house, and rejoined me. At the corner we burst out laughing almost simultaneously. And then my friend suddenly stopped and stared at me.

“Hepworth’s old clerk!” he said. “Ellenby!”

* * *

It seemed to him monstrous. The man had been more than a clerk. The family had treated him as a friend. Hepworth’s father had set him up in business. For the murdered lad he had had a sincere attachment; he had left that conviction on all of them. What was the meaning of it?

A directory was on the mantelpiece. It was the next afternoon. I had called upon him in his chambers. It was just an idea that came to me. I crossed over and opened it, and there was his name, “Ellenby and Co., Ships’ Furnishers,” in a court off the Minories.

Was he helping her for the sake of his dead master–trying to get her away from the man. But why? The woman had stood by and watched the lad murdered. How could he bear even to look on her again?

Unless there had been that something that had not come out– something he had learnt later–that excused even that monstrous callousness of hers.

Yet what could there be? It had all been so planned, so cold-blooded. That shaving in the dining-room! It was that seemed most to stick in his throat. She must have brought him down a looking-glass; there was not one in the room. Why couldn’t he have gone upstairs into the bathroom, where Hepworth always shaved himself, where he would have found everything to his hand?

He had been moving about the room, talking disjointedly as he paced, and suddenly he stopped and looked at me.

“Why in the dining-room?” he demanded of me.

He was jingling some keys in his pocket. It was a habit of his when cross-examining, and I felt as if somehow I knew; and, without thinking–so it seemed to me–I answered him.

“Perhaps,” I said, “it was easier to bring a razor down than to carry a dead man up.”

He leant with his arms across the table, his eyes glittering with excitement.

“Can’t you see it?” he said. “That little back parlour with its fussy ornaments. The three of them standing round the table, Hepworth’s hands nervously clutching a chair. The reproaches, the taunts, the threats. Young Hepworth–he struck everyone as a weak man, a man physically afraid–white, stammering, not knowing which way to look. The woman’s eyes turning from one to the other. That flash of contempt again–she could not help it–followed, worse still, by pity. If only he could have answered back, held his own! If only he had not been afraid! And then that fatal turning away with a sneering laugh one imagines, the bold, dominating eyes no longer there to cower him.