Summary. It was Nan Pringle who killed Cousin R, and she never touched the sabre that did it. She wrote two letters on the Colonel's own paper, in a copperplate any schoolgirl might claim, and sent one man to a room and the other man's rage to meet him there, because Cousin R had announced at his own dinner table that he had begun keeping a record of her, and a woman whose whole safety lies in not being looked at could not live with being read.

The Reckoning. The mechanism is plain enough once the paper is looked at properly. Two sheets, the same stock, the same hand, and both traced to a writing-case that Mrs Gow had left in order at six o'clock and found disturbed by eleven. One note went under the Colonel's door, touching the one wound in the house he cannot be approached on — his wife, lost abroad, never once discussed — and named the gun-room at eleven. The other went into Cousin R's pocket, naming the same room and the same hour, pitched exactly at a man who had just told the table he watched people for a living. Mrs Gow saw Nan on the back stair at a quarter to eleven with a candle and thought nothing of it, because nobody at that house has ever thought anything of Nan. She had the run of the morning-room. She had nine years of being unremarked to draw on. She used both.

The Colonel struck the blow, and I will not pretend otherwise, but a man does not forge a summons to himself in a hand not his own and then stand over the body he was lured to. He was the instrument, not the author. The rest fall quickly, and I set them down without ceremony, for none of them cost me much thought. Xerxes, Wat, and Quill were at cards together from ten o'clock, each vouching the other two, and none of them had cause: R's own pocket-book named nothing of theirs. Zane was on the trays between billiard-room and pantry the whole hour, seen at both ends of every errand. Fifi was with Mrs Gow scalding pans, in a passage that does not lead to the morning-room. Lavinia sat at the drawing-room fire and was found there twice by the housekeeper's own coals. Effie walked the terrace gravel under the coachman's eye until the house was roused. Aziz sat in the conservatory, passed three times by Mrs Gow, and never crossed toward the gun-room at all. None of them wrote that hand, and none of them needed to.

The motive is the smallest thing in the case and the whole of it. Nan Pringle has lived at Cruikshank Manor nine years on charity and without wages, carrying the post and keeping the book, and her only protection in that house has been that no one troubles to look at her. Cousin R was the one guest in it sharp enough to look anyway, and he had been keeping a private record — that she counts plate she does not own, that she reads letters left face-down, that she watches the footman Zane and believes herself unwatched in it. Two of those three things she had told no living soul. To be compiled so, and announced so, over the curry, in front of the whole table, was for her not embarrassment but ruin, and she answered it the only way her nine years had taught her to answer anything: quietly, by letter, and through someone else's hand. I had nearly forgotten the smallest of it — she never once crossed the gun-room threshold that night; the door has no lock, and her feet never needed one.

It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I have charged her accordingly. The sabre goes back on its hooks, the book goes back under her arm, and the house will want its silver counted by someone else from now on.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Nan the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Cousin R 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.