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140
RAVENSDENE COURT

Mr. Cazalette probably has a copy of the enlarged photograph within it. And, this morning, while Mr. Cazalette is bathing, he gets it! Gentlemen!—what does this show? One thing as a certainty—the murderer is close at hand!"

There was a dead silence—broken at last by a querulous murmur from Mr. Cazalette himself.

"Ye may be as sure o' that, my man, as that Arthur's Seat o'erlooks Edinbro'!" he said. "I wish I was as sure o' his identity!"

"Well, we know something that's gradually bringing us toward establishing that," remarked Scarterfield. "Let me see that photograph again, if you please."

The rest of us watched Scarterfield as he studied the thing over which Mr. Cazalette and I had exercised our brains in the half-hour before dinner. He seemed to get no more information from a long perusal of it than we had got, and he finally threw it away from him across the table, with a muttered exclamation which confessed discomfiture. Miss Raven picked up the photograph.

"Aye!" mumbled Mr. Cazalette. "Let the lassie look at it! Maybe a woman's brains is more use than a man's whiles."

"Often!" said the detective. "And if Miss Raven can make anything of that———"

I saw that Miss Raven was already wishful to speak, and I hastened to encourage her by throwing a word to Scarterfield.

"You'd be infinitely obliged to her, I'm sure," I put in. "It would be a help?"