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76 He passed on without stopping, and so probably did not notice Mr. Chichester's agitation. I did. Whatever it was he had dropped, its recovery agitated him considerably. He turned a sickly green, and crumpled up the sheet of paper into a ball. My suspicions were accentuated a hundred-fold.

He caught my eye, and hurried into explanations.

"A—a—fragment of a sermon I was composing," he said with a sickly smile.

"Indeed?" I rejoined politely.

A fragment of a sermon, indeed! No, Mr. Chichester—too weak for words!

He soon left me with a muttered excuse. I wished, oh, how I wished, that I had been the one to pick up that paper and not Sir Eustace Pedler! One thing was clear, Mr. Chichester could not be exempted from my list of suspects. I was inclined to put him top of the three.

After lunch, when I came up to the lounge for coffee, I noticed Sir Eustace and Pagett sitting with Mrs. Blair and Colonel Race. Mrs. Blair welcomed me with a smile, so I went over and joined them. They were talking about Italy.

"But it is misleading," Mrs. Blair insisted. "Aqua calda certainly ought to be cold water—not hot."

"You're not a Latin scholar," said Sir Eustace, smiling.

"Men are so superior about their Latin," said Mrs. Blair. "But all the same I notice that when you ask them to translate inscriptions in old churches they can never do it! They hem and haw, and get out of it somehow."

"Quite right," said Colonel Race. "I always do."

"But I love the Italians," continued Mrs. Blair. "They're so obliging—though even that has its embarrassing side. You ask them the way somewhere, and instead of saying 'first to the right, second to the left' or