Barrant hastened from the room downstairs to the front door. From the open doorway he saw Charles Turold advancing across the rocks in the direction of the house, and he ran swiftly down the gravel path to intercept him.

Charles looked up and came on as if there was nothing to turn back for. His clear glance dwelt on the figure by the gate without fear—with seeming gratification. Barrant was amazed. He had been prepared for an attempt at flight, but not this welcoming look. Never before had he known a man show joy at the prospect of arrest. The experience was so disturbing that he went across the intervening space to meet Charles, and laid a hand upon his arm.

“I suppose you know you are wanted by the police?” he said.

“I am aware of it,” was the quiet reply. “I was going to give myself up.”

“Did you come back to Cornwall for that purpose?” asked the detective, shooting another puzzled glance at him.

“I came back to try and discover the truth.”

“About what?”

“About my uncle’s death.”

“And have you discovered it?”

“I have.”

Barrant did not understand the young man’s attitude, or the tone of heartfelt relief in which he uttered these words, but he felt that the conversation in its present form had gone far enough.

“Do you propose to tell me the truth?” he asked, with a slight cynical emphasis on the last word.

“I do.”

Barrant’s surprise kept him silent for a moment, but when he spoke he was very incisive—

“In that case it is my duty to warn you—”

“There is no need to warn me,” Charles quickly interrupted. “I know. Any statement I make will be taken down and used against me. That’s the formula, isn’t it, or something to that effect? Let us go into the house—my story will take some time in the telling.”

He made this request as a right rather than a favour, and Barrant found himself turning in at the gate with him. In silence they walked to the house, and it was Charles Turold who led the way to the sitting-room.

“It was here it began,” he murmured, glancing round the deserted apartment, “and it seems fitting that the truth should be brought to light in the same place.”

“Provided that it is the truth,” commented his companion.

Charles did not reply. They had been standing face to face, but he now drew a chair to the table and sat down. Barrant walked to the door and locked it before seating himself beside him.

“You can begin as soon as you like,” he said.

“I think I had better tell you about my own actions, first of all, on that night,” said Charles, after a brief silence. “It will clear the way for what follows. I was up here that night—the night of the murder.”

“I know that much,” was Barrant’s cold comment.

“You suspected it—you did not know it,” Charles quickly rejoined.

He remained profoundly silent for a moment, as if meditating his words, and then plunged into his tale.

The account of his own visit to Flint House on the night of the murder he related with details withheld from Sisily. The visit was the outcome of a quarrel between father and son over Robert Turold’s announcement about his wife’s previous marriage. Charles was shocked by his uncle’s decision to make the story public, and had wandered about the cliffs until dark trying to decide what to do. Ultimately he returned home and asked his father to use his influence with his brother to keep the secret in the family. His father called him a fool for suggesting such a thing, declined to offend his brother or blast his own prospects by such damned quixotic nonsense. On this Charles had announced his intention of seeing his uncle and telling him he would leave England immediately and forever unless the scandal was kept quiet. That made his father angry, and they quarrelled violently. Charles cut the quarrel short by flinging out of the house in the rain, to carry out his intention of interviewing his uncle. He walked across the moors to Flint House. The front door was open, the downstairs portion of the house in darkness, and his uncle lying upstairs in his study—dead.

He hurried over all this as of small importance in the deeper significance of Thalassa’s story. That was to him the great thing—the wonderful discovery which was to clear Sisily and put everything right. He believed that the plan which had brought him to Cornwall was working splendidly. The chance encounter with the detective was really providential—a speeding up, a saving of valuable time.

The possibility of disbelief did not dawn upon him. He overlooked that his listener was also his custodian and judge—the suspicious arbiter of a belated story told by one whose own actions were in the highest degree suspicious. His overburdened mind forgot these things in the excitement of hope. He talked with the candour and freedom of one young man confiding in another. When he had finished he looked at his companion expectantly, but Barrant’s eyes were coldly official.

“A strange story!” he said.

“A true one,” Charles eagerly rejoined. “Thalassa has been walking along the coast ever since in the expectation of finding this man. He will kill him if he meets him.”

It was Barrant’s lot to listen to many strange stories which were always true, according to the narrators, but generally they caused him to feel ashamed of the poverty of human invention. He was not immediately concerned to discover whether Thalassa’s story was true or false, or whether it had been concocted between him and Charles with the object of deceiving the authorities. The consideration of that infamous brownfaced scoundrel’s confession could be postponed—if it had ever been made. The present business was with Charles Turold. There was something infernally mysterious in his unexpected reappearance in that spot. He had gone to London when he disappeared—he admitted that. What had brought him back? To see Thalassa, as he said, in order to try and get at the truth? Nonsense! He—Barrant—was not simple enough to believe that. What then?

Barrant was not prepared to supply a ready answer to that question. But his trained ear had detected many gaps in the young man’s own narrative which, filled in, might give it. Turold knew more than he had said—he was keeping things back. Again—what things? Behind him stood the shadowy figure of the girl and her unexplained flight. Barrant’s instinct told him that Charles was shielding her. He turned to the task of endeavouring to reach the truth.

“Let’s go back a bit,” he said casually. “You’ve left one or two points in your own story unexplained. What about the key?”

“The key?” Charles started slightly. “You mean—”

“I mean the key of the room upstairs. You said you found the key in the passage outside. You must have locked the door after you and taken it away with you.”

“I did,” replied the young man, in some hesitation.

“For what reason?”

Charles realized that he was on very thin ice. In his intense preoccupation with Thalassa’s story he had forgotten that his own impulsive actions on that night must be construed as proof of his own guilt or bear too literal interpretation of having been done to shield Sisily. He saw that he was in a position of extraordinary difficulty.

“I was hardly conscious of what I was doing, at the time,” he said.

“You took the key away with you?”

Charles nodded with the feeling that the ice was cracking beneath him.

“And how did it get back into the room afterwards?”

Charles paused to consider his reply, but the detective supplied it.

“The inference is fairly obvious,” he said. “The key was found inside the study after the locked door was burst open. It was your father who found it, on the floor. At least, he pretended to find it there. It was your father who started the suicide theory.” He paused, then added in a smooth reflective voice, “Really, the whole thing was very ingenious. It reflects much credit on both of you.”

Charles spoke with an air of sudden decision.

“My fath............