Summary. It was Effie who sat her so carefully in that chair, and the why of it is dull enough to be true: the girl had caught her at the medicine cupboard, and a maid who knows a thing and repeats things could not be left about the house at the very hour Effie needed her expectations, and her creditors' patience, kept whole. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The method wants little telling. Effie, dogged that season by chemist's chits she could not meet, had been drawing off the Colonel's sleeping draught from the back-stair cupboard for some time before that wet evening — Mrs Gow found the bottle lighter than it ought to be, and that was the whole of the mystery in one sentence, though it took the household longer to read it. Fifi carried up the séance tray at nine and was to take her own cocoa after from the jug that served the company; Effie dosed it before ever the sitting began. She excused herself from the table once or twice "for air," as she told it, and in one of those absences found the girl drowsing in the linen-room and saw the thing finished. Then she did what a frightened woman with a taste for theatre does: she made it pretty. Candle set, cup arranged, hands folded, and — the nicest touch, and the one that undid her — the Colonel's missing felt hat squared at the elbow, meant to throw the eye toward Cousin R and his known habit of setting a room to rights. It was a fair mimicry. It was not his work. A man who cannot leave a mantel un-arranged does not set a hat backward, band to the front, nor leave a candle to gutter unwatched to its socket; those are the errors of someone imitating a composure she does not live in. That is the whole of the tell, and it is enough.

The rest of the house falls away by plain arithmetic of where people were sitting. The Colonel, Lavinia, Nan, and Cousin R were linked hand to hand at that table from nine until past ten and none broke the circle; whatever else they are guilty of in this life, they did not dose a cocoa-jug or arrange a chair. Xerxes was shut in the study with Mrs Gow's coffee marking his hours, and Aziz waited in the small parlour under the same woman's eye, neither of them near the back stair in the window that mattered. Wat came in from the storm well after the cocoa was already carried up and dosed, and sat under Mrs Gow's eye taking rum; he never went above stairs before the alarm. Zane, the girl's own twin, was at the Colonel's plate the whole evening, in view or on errand. The debts that might have pointed elsewhere belong to no one but Effie — chemist's chits in her name, not Fifi's, and no wages owed the dead girl by anybody. Only Effie was loose in the house that night, in and out of the drawing-room as she pleased, with the means in the cupboard and the motive walking about on two legs in a parlourmaid's apron.

I had very nearly let the hat go as a queer accident of a nervous hand, backward hats being the sort of thing a man might do to himself without help. But a squared arrangement is squared on purpose, always, and a purposeful hand does not err in ignorance of which way a hat sits — it errs only in ignorance of the man it is pretending to be. That, in the end, is what closed it.

I have charged Effie with the wilful killing of Fenella Swain, called Fifi, the Colonel's parlourmaid, and the matter goes forward to the assizes. The Manor's third this twelvemonth, by my count. I do not expect it will be the last I am called to.

They'll whisper a fortnight the hand it was cold,
that Effie was in it, the whole of it told.
And Fifi, the colder, is carried the door,
and Cairnholm's acquaintance the fewer by four.
We'll vow to be watchful, we'll counsel more care —
and mean not a syllable, ever, we swear.