Summary. It was Cousin R, and for no reason a court will find familiar: he kept a flower-press, and pressed moths besides, and Effie Strange had gone by the household's own tired phrase — the moth of Cairnholm — long before he ever thought to make her one in fact. He killed her to have her, at last, arranged correctly.

The Reckoning. The room did the talking, once I troubled to listen to it. The furniture had been moved a fortnight before the Colonel came home, and moved a little at a time, by a man who was seen at it most days and thought nothing of it because he is always seen tidying something. The chaise under the window, the lamp shifted to the far table — the effect, whether by accident or design, was that a body laid on that chaise sat in shadow and could not be seen from the door. That is not the work of an evening. That is the work of a fortnight, done by someone with leisure in the house and no one asking his business.

The method was plain enough once Quill had looked at her: smothering, done quietly, no struggle to speak of, the cushion set back and the glass left standing so that nothing in the room appeared to have been touched. Mrs Gow, watching the one passage that mattered from half past nine to eleven, saw Effie go through at half past nine and Cousin R follow at a quarter to ten. He came back to his cards at ten, remarking that Effie wished to be left with the rain — a tidy lie, and true enough to the letter that nobody thought to question it.

The rest of the house falls away without much labour. The Colonel held his portraits and his temper in the drawing-room the whole evening, in company, and never went near the passage Mrs Gow was watching; his silence on Effie's letters is a small meanness, not a motive that fits the room. Nan took her scolding in the drawing-room from half past nine, under the Colonel's own eye. Lavinia was at cards from dinner onward and used no passage Mrs Gow did not see empty. Quill was over the port until ten and then in company. Zane was belowstairs the whole span, vouched for throughout, and had lately had Effie's good word to the Colonel over a broken decanter — no live grudge there, only a debt of the other kind. Xerxes had left the house a full half hour before Effie ever rose from the table, and had thanked her that evening, before the company, for a favour done him. Fifi was belowstairs until sent through at eleven, and it was she who found what was left to find. The household's own first thought — that this was money, that Effie's debts or her letters to the Colonel had put her in someone's way — does not survive Mrs Gow's watch on that passage, which admits one man and no other.

I had nearly set the file down without accounting for the moth on the sill, taking it for the gardener's carelessness or the season's. It was neither. The window had been painted shut since August and had not been opened that evening; the gardener swore to it, and swore too that no moth had been seen in that room the whole fortnight. It had come from a book upstairs, from a press full of pale things laid open and dated in a small careful hand, and someone had taken a moment, with the woman dead behind him, to set its wings even. That is not a signature left to be admired. It is a habit that could not be helped. It closes the matter as neatly as he closed that window years before, and it is on that, with what he pressed beside his flowers, that I have charged Cousin R — the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the county no nearer done with him than he was with her.

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