“I’m not, eh?” replied the man. “Well, that’s true, but it can’t be helped now, can it? I know the thing and I can’t unknow it again.

It’s unfortunate, but there it is. At any rate you have the comfort of knowing that nothing disagreeable is likely to happen to me. Dear me! Rugby already. I get out here. I have a little bit of business to do at Rugby.”

He rose and shook himself, buttoned his raincoat about him, and pulled the shabby hat more firmly down about his enigmatic glasses.

The train slowed down and stopped. With a brief good night and a crooked smile the man stepped onto the platform. Pender watched him stride quickly away into the drizzle beyond the radius of the gas light.

“Dotty or something,” said Pender, oddly relieved. “Thank goodness, I seem to be going to have the compartment to myself.”

He returned to Murder at the Manse, but his attention still kept wandering from the book he held in his hand.

“What was the name of that stuff the fellow talked about? Sulphate of what?”

For the life of him he could not remember.

It was on the following afternoon that Pender saw the news item.

He had bought the Standard to read at lunch, and the word “Bath”

caught his eye; otherwise he would probably have missed the paragraph altogether, for it was only a short one.

WEALTHY MANUFACTURER DIES IN BATH

WIFE’S TRAGIC DISCOVERY

A distressing discovery was made early this morning by Mrs.

John Brittlesea, wife of the well-known head of Brittlesea’s Engineering Works at Rugby. Finding that her husband, whom she had seen alive and well less than an hour previously, did not come down in time for his breakfast, she searched for him in the bathroom, where the engineer was found lying dead in his bath; life having been extinct, according to the medical men, for half an hour.

The cause of the death is pronounced to be heart failure. The deceased manufacturer…