Miss Turner.”


“Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly, insanely,

in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he

really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what

does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry

her at a registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can

imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he

would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible.

It was sheer frenzy of this sort which made him throw his hands up into the air

when his father, at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss

Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself, and his

father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would have thrown him over

utterly had he known the truth. It was with his barmaid wife that he had spent

the last three days in Bristol, and his father did not know where he was. Mark

that point. It is of importance. Good has come out of evil, however, for the

barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious trouble and likely to be

hanged, has thrown him over utterly and has written to him to say that she has

a husband already in the Bermuda Dockyard, so that there is really no tie

between them. I think that that bit of news has consoled young McCarthy for all

that he has suffered.”


“But if he is innocent, who has done it?”


“Ah! who? I would call your attention very particularly to two points.

One is that the murdered man had an appointment with someone at the pool, and

that the someone could not have been his son, for his son was away, and he did

not know when he would return. The second is that the murdered man was heard to

cry ‘Cooee!’ before he knew that his son had returned. Those are

the crucial points upon which the case depends. And now let us talk about