meet Ian Barr in the woods on the afternoon of the murder, or that she had met him. And the person who had started the story that the young man had been seen on that day could not be unearthed. Inquiries at the railway-station had drawn blanks; and Miss Verney professed not to know where Ian Barr was at the present moment, though she admitted that, for a short time, she had been engaged to him, and that they still wrote to each other occasionally. Beyond this she would admit nothing, and she gave her answers like a mechanical doll. She swore that the breaking of her engagement was not due to Lady Hereward's expressed wish, but to "private reasons." She vowed that, as far as she knew, Lady Hereward had not made things so unpleasant for Mr. Barr that he had resigned his stewardship, nor had the lady forbidden him to visit his fiancée under her roof. There was not, she said, a word of truth in the stupid story that Ian Barr had disliked Lady Hereward. He wished to leave Friars' Moat because he hoped to better his position, in order to marry; and he preferred to make a home in some distant place where his parentage was not a matter of gossip. But there were those in the room, among others Mr. Samways, the coroner, and several members of the jury, who thought that beautiful, pale Miss Verney did not look as if she were telling the truth, or at all events the whole truth. To their searching eyes, she had the air of a culprit, rather than that of a
