Summary. It was Cousin R, and the why of it is the coldest thing I have carried to a magistrate in some years: he smothered Nan Pringle because a miscount at Friday's sitting had shown him what she truly was, and he wanted the picture finished.

The Reckoning. The method is plain enough and Dr Quill had it right from the first look. Between eight o'clock and nine o'clock, while the house scattered itself about its Sunday evening in the manner households do, Cousin R went up to the landing with his sketchbook — an errand nobody thought to question, since he had carried that book about the Manor for a fortnight and everyone had grown used to the sight of it. Nan sat where she sat every evening of her life there, in the wing chair in the green sitting-room, the one room nobody troubles to enter after dinner. He took up the cushion from the window seat, held it to her face until she was still, and then composed her — hands folded, spectacles closed, workbasket set at her foot, the room otherwise exactly as she had left it. He dropped the cushion a yard off, face down, and went down to the morning room as though nothing in the world had altered. It had not, much, for anyone but her.

The house furnished alibis enough to clear every other soul under its roof, and I will not linger over them past their due. The Colonel and Dr Quill had each other from eight o'clock to the alarm, neither out of the other's sight. Xerxes and Wat had the same of each other over the venture papers. Lavinia and Effie sat at cards together the whole window through. Aziz was in the wet stable yard with the Colonel's groom to vouch for him, and no marriage had been accepted that might have given him cause. Fifi and Zane were both under Mrs Gow's eye belowstairs, and it was Zane, in the end, who went up and found what had been made of the chair. Wat had twice offered Nan money for what she knew and been refused, but her column of the evening's company lay untouched beneath her spectacles — the one paper a man of his trade would not have left behind. Lavinia's fear of the linen passage came to nothing for the same reason. Only Cousin R walked that hour alone, with a book in his hand that everybody had already stopped asking questions about.

For it was not money, and it was not knowledge, that moved him, though the house wondered at both. Nan Pringle had spent eleven years making herself so thoroughly unnoticed that a table could be laid short with her sitting at it, and had never once turned what she overheard into coin, though she had opportunity enough. She wanted nothing from anybody, and asked for less. Cousin R is a man who collects — habits, secrets, small cruelties noted and kept — and had never spent a thought on her until the Friday the company was counted and came out one short with her in the room. He saw then what he had been sketching blind for a fortnight: absence, complete and furnished, in a house too full of people to notice it happening. She was the finished version of the thing he had been drawing empty. He killed her, I believe, exactly as a man finishes a study he has been unable to leave alone — not for gain, not for silence, but because a woman already dissolved from a counted room could be arranged into a permanence no one would think to disturb. It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the coldest of the three by a fair distance. I have charged him, and the sketchbook goes with the file.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Cousin R the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Nan lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.