Summary. It was Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, and the reason was not the one the household first reached for. He had gone looking for a signature that night and found instead, alone in the breakfast-room, the man who had told him that afternoon he would never get it — and standing over him, he understood at last why the refusal would never be withdrawn. He struck once, with a sabre that had stood in the umbrella-stand for years and belonged to no man in particular, and I set it down here plainly, as I am bound to.

The Reckoning. The venture wanted money, and the money wanted a marriage, and the marriage had been refused three times without Xerxes ever giving his reason. That much the Colonel had swallowed for a fortnight, loud as he is about it. What he could not swallow came at a quarter to ten, when the library door was shut against him with Dr Quill inside, and he turned back along the passage and found Aziz sitting alone. Words passed; the prospectus was torn between them; the side-table and the bowl went over in the scuffle. The Colonel crossed to the vestibule, drew one of the two sabres that stood there for any guest to see, came back, and stabbed Aziz once, from the front, standing square over him as Dr Quill's own examination shows. He let the sabre fall across the dead man's knees, stripped off his soiled coat, rolled it small, and pushed it under Mabel's water-pan in the conservatory, where he then stood out the better part of an hour under the glazed porch — a porch the rain never reached — waiting for a story about the weather to become true. It never did; the coat was found exactly where he had put it, and no rain had touched him at all.

The gift-pin did it, in the end, though I nearly forgot to set it down, being a small thing beside a sabre. Aziz wore it always, a chip of sapphire no companion buys for himself, and the connecting door between his room and his master's had two keys on one ring. The Colonel had looked at that pin for years and called it nothing. Standing over the body he saw it for what it was, and understood in the same instant that the refusal he had been fighting for a fortnight had nothing to do with settlements and would never be argued round. Money he could have gone on losing. What Aziz was to Xerxes he could not.

The rest of the house falls away easily enough. Miss Pringle poured tea at the long table from nine until the alarm, under four pairs of eyes, and never crossed the vestibule at all. Captain Frew was on the quay with the harbour clerk until half past ten and did not reach the house till a quarter to eleven, well outside the hour that mattered. Mr Gaunt was at his devotions with the chapel door standing open, seen by two maids on the stair, and nothing had ever passed between him and Aziz to move him to anything. Miss Strange never left the card-table, by the word of three witnesses, and the Sapphire on its velvet was untouched — not what her sort of want would have left behind. Dr Quill was shut in the library with Xerxes the whole hour, which is precisely the fact that sent the Colonel back along that passage in the first place. And Cousin R sat at cards from a quarter to ten, a tidy man who has never in his life left a room in the state that breakfast-room was left in.

This makes the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last from that house. Colonel Cruikshank will answer for Aziz's death before the assizes; what Aziz was to his master is nobody's business to put in a charge sheet, and I have not put it in mine. The file is closed.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and the Colonel the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Aziz 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.