Summary. It was the Reverend Gaunt, and not for the engagement at all, whatever the household made of that; he judged her a soul rotted with covetousness, and elected to be her sentence rather than her rescue. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The stair-rod did the falling, but the hour on the flags did the killing, and that hour is the whole of the matter. Dr Quill said plainly that the fall alone would not have carried her off — it was the better part of an hour lying broken in the cold that did it, and he was the one who told us so, unasked, which is not the habit of a guilty man. Twelve feet from where she lay ran a bell-pull that would have brought the whole billiard room down upon her in a minute, and it was never touched. Above her, an open window that carries every sound of the stair-foot to the passage and back again — the Colonel's own arrangement, and no secret to anyone who dined at that table above a fortnight. Whoever kept the passage that night heard her fall and did not choose to hear it further.

The company in the billiard room clears itself by its own solemnity. Aziz kept the score-slate under three pairs of eyes from nine until midnight and was never off it long enough to reach the back stair and return unremarked; Xerxes paid his guinea in full view at ten and drove home with Aziz after; the Colonel was occupied the entire evening being seen to win, which a man arranging a fall for his own poor relation would scarcely trouble to be. Cousin R kept the book and never left his chair. Lady Lavinia was not in the house at all — gone to Hartfield after dinner and vouched for there from nine until morning, which puts the loose rod and the long hour equally beyond her reach. Quill I have already acquitted by his own evidence; a man does not hand you the fact that convicts him unless he had no hand in the deed it convicts.

That leaves the one man who left the company for the cold passage at eleven and returned at half past with dust on his knees he called porch-step, and a prayer-book on the passage sill that had not been there an hour before. Gaunt is the only soul in that house who both knew of Nan's dealings and held himself entitled to answer for them. On the morning of the wager a tradesman's widow had shown him letters proving what the parish had only suspected — that Nan had for six years taken a fifth part of every account rendered to the Manor, ruining at least the one man outright, and stood three weeks from being rewarded for the whole of it with a marriage into a fortune. Gaunt is not a man who forgives what he judges, and does not take payment to look elsewhere; he had twice refused the Colonel's money on other matters and once refused Wat Frew's, and he did not intend that covetousness should collect its wages while he stood by with the means to prevent it. He worked the already-loose rod free — no tool needed, no mark left that spoke his hand — and when she came down at her fixed eleven o'clock, as she had every night of those eleven years, he let her fall, and then knelt over her and prayed rather than rang the bell. Two knee-prints in the dust, not one, for he shifted as the praying wore on. He is not, in his own accounting, a murderer; he is a man who declined to be merciful, and drew a very fine line between the two that the law does not trouble to draw at all.

I make it three this twelvemonth, by my count, and the year not yet out. I had near forgot the smallest of it — the prayer-book left face down, its place still marked, at the very window through which a man might have heard her calling and did not trouble to listen for it. That, more than the dust on his knees, is what closes the file. He is charged, and the parish poor-box will want a new custodian for its guinea.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Gaunt 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.