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The afternoon seemed a compensation for yesterday; October sun glowed temperately over the links, with the air of a kind old gentleman producing sweetmeats unexpectedly. The rich but transient gold of summer evenings seemed hoarded in this summer of St. Luke; the air not over-charged with uneasy heat, but lucid and caressing; the leaves no longer in the shock of their summer finery, but dignified in the decayed gentility of their autumn gold. A perfect day for golf, such was the immediate impression of the Paston Oatvile mind; but to Reeves a second thought occurred—it was a bad day for following up the clues of a murder.

"It's all very well," he said to Gordon, "the visibility's good, and we shan't be interrupted by rain; but we can't get the atmosphere; the spiritual atmosphere, I mean, of yesterday's fog and drizzle. We shall see where a man fell down the embankment, but we shan't feel the impulse of that weeping depression which made him throw himself over, or made somebody else save him the trouble. We haven't got the mise-en-scène of a tragedy."

They climbed together, Gordon and he; a zigzag