Summary. It was the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, and no thief nor jealous hand at all; he had that afternoon come upon what Xerxes kept locked from the rest of the house, and by evening had judged Aziz the occasion of another man's sin, to be removed as a penance owed. Here is how I came to it, and it is the third such reckoning I have written this twelvemonth.

The Reckoning. The blow was struck in the garden passage, once, from behind, with no struggle and nothing taken — not robbery, then, whatever the unlatched door and the guttering lamps first suggested to the household. The stick tells its own tale: a common blackthorn out of the umbrella-stand, handled by every guest and servant that week, identifying no one. That is not the mark of a man who meant to be found out, nor of a man ashamed enough to hide his instrument. It is the mark of a man who saw nothing in the act requiring concealment.

Xerxes carried the toasts before the whole company, dining-room and smoking-room both, and was never out of sight until the alarm; he had no interval for the passage. The Colonel and Dr Quill kept each other's company at cards from the sweets onward, unbroken. Lady Lavinia held her circle by candlelight with Effie and Cousin R the whole late evening, three witnesses for three absences at once. Wat was in the cellar and yard with two of Xerxes's own men vouching him across the death-window — a man with grievances of his own, but no opportunity to act on them that night. The Cruikshank household never left its beds, nor its own roof. Each falls on the same ground: someone else's eyes on them, unbroken, through the hour that mattered.

Gaunt alone had no one's eyes on him. He rose before the sweets, did not sit with the smokers, and went out the garden door as a man might who meant to walk and pray. He came in by the same door near the end of the evening. That is opportunity plain. For cause, I nearly forgot the servant's misdirection that afternoon — a small thing, easily overlooked, but it put him alone for a good while on the floor of Xerxes's chamber, before the household chapel had put him in this particular temper. A man does not come to dinner silent and unable to look at his host's companion for nothing. What he found there is the household's business and none of mine to set down in plain words; I will say only that it was of a kind the drawing-room does not discuss, and that Gaunt read it as evidence of a soul in peril. He did not scheme, did not conceal, did not so much as look ashamed when I put it to him. He told me plainly that the occasion of sin, once known, was a thing owed correction, and that he had done what duty required. He is a preacher who believes he has never sinned in the doing of God's work; I expect he believes it yet. I have charged him with the killing of Aziz, and he goes to answer for it, unrepentant, as I have found him.

Gaunt came to call one winter, cold and plain,
Young Aziz fell before the household's pain.
A blackthorn stick, left standing by the door,
Met him that evening in the passage floor.
The moral: guard your guests with watchful care,
Or judgment falls from those already there.