Such a man must have had ample occasion for the study of human nature under strange aspects. It was, therefore, a highly-trained intellect which was now brought to bear upon Bothwell Grahame, as he walked silently beside the flowering hedgerows in that quiet Cornish lane, puffing at his cigar, and looking straight before him into vacancy.
Mr. Heathcote had seen a good deal of Captain Grahame during the year he had lived at Penmorval; but he never had seen such a look of care as he saw in the soldier's face to-day. Trouble of some kind—and of no light or trifling kind—was gnawing the man's breast. Of that fact Edward Heathcote was assured; and there was a strange sinking at his own heart as he speculated upon the nature of that secret trouble which Bothwell was trying his best to hide under a show of somewhat sullen indifference.
As coroner and as lawyer, Mr. Heathcote had made up his mind more than an hour ago that the girl lying at the Vital Spark had been murdered. She had been thrust out of the railway carriage, flung over the line into that dreadful gulf, by some person who wanted to make away with her. Her murderer was to be looked for in the train, had travelled in one of those carriages, had been one among those seemingly innocent travellers, all professing ignorance of the girl's identity. One among those three-and-twenty people whom Chafy, the station-master, had counted and taken stock of at Bodmin Road station, must needs be the murderer. That one, whoever he was, had borne himself so well as to baffle the station-master's scrutiny. He had shown no trace of remorse, agitation, guilty fear. He had behaved himself in all points as an innocent man.
But what if the criminal were one whom the station-master knew and respected—a man of mark and standing in the neighbourhood, whose very name disarmed suspicion?
Such a man would have passed out of the station unobserved; or if any signs of agitation were noted in his manner, that emotion would be put down to kindly feeling, the natural pity of a benevolent mind. Had any hard-handed son of toil, a stranger in the land, reaper, miner, seafaring man—had such an one as this exhibited signs of discomposure, suspicion would at once have been on the alert. But who could suspect Mrs. Wyllard's soldier-cousin, the idle open-handed gentleman, who had made himself everybody's favourite?
It would have been a wild speculation to suppose, because Bothwell's countenance and manner were so charged with secret trouble, that his was the arm which thrust that poor girl to her untimely death. Yet the Coroner found himself dwelling upon this wild fancy, painful as it was to him to harbour any evil thought of Dora Wyllard's kinsman.
There were several points which forced themselves upon his
