Summary. It was Cousin R, and he did it neither for gain nor from any quarrel, but to correct the record, as he understood correction; here is how the thing stands.

The Reckoning. He killed Aziz at eleven o'clock, in the conservatory, with a length of green curtain cord cut for the purpose, and he was not disturbed because no one in that house had reason to disturb him. The cord came from the dining-room ties; the knot was turned to the back of the neck, tidy, no struggle in it. Quill's estimate of the hour and the position of the body agree with what the household's own comings and goings allow: Aziz took his hour in the conservatory as he always did, and the only door that opened on him unwatched that night was the blue bedroom's, which is Cousin R's own. He came through, did the thing quietly, and then had the rest of the dark to himself, for the household had gone up by half past eleven and nobody looked in on him again till morning.

What he spent that night on was not concealment — he made no attempt to hide the body or himself — but composition. He seated Aziz upright, opened his hands, set the fez straight, squared the chair to the garden doors, and put a lamp behind it for a backlight, the way a man lights a subject he means to have seen properly. Fifty-one pressed marigolds went down in a closed ring, one more in the breast pocket, all from his own press, the same press that has furnished four albums of specimens each dated and labelled in his hand. He had asked the gardener, the day before, whether the flower carried any funeral meaning abroad, and written the answer down. That is not a man arming himself for a quarrel. That is a man checking his label before he prints it.

The sapphire and the four sovereigns were left exactly where they lay, which disposes at once of robbery and of every suspect whose motive wanted money. Effie had admired the stone twice and is known to want funds badly, but she was in the drawing room with Lavinia until half past eleven and then behind a corridor door Lavinia bolted herself, and she had already got what she wanted of Wat in the hall before ten — she had no need of the sapphire and no hour to take it in. Wat had been refused the ring once already and had a plainer motive than most, but he left the house at ten past ten and was seen aboard the Kittiwake from half past ten till dawn by two watermen; he was gone an hour before the death and absent the whole night the tableau demanded. Lavinia is cleared with Effie, by the same bolted door. Gaunt walked to the manse at a quarter past ten and sat over the parish accounts with his housekeeper till one; he was off the premises before eleven and accounted for through the hours after. Xerxes sat with the Colonel over brandy till midnight and was seen twice more by the night-maid before two; he had no unwatched stretch in that wing, and besides, the flowers came from a press that was never his — a small thing, but it seals what the hours already showed.

The dinner is where the true grain of it lies, and I nearly overlooked how plainly it was set out. Eleven years Aziz had been in that house, and the dinner in his honour made him, for one evening, a specimen on show — a devoted, hidden thing, publicly mislabelled as a curiosity from a country not his own, admired by strangers who did not trouble to ask him a single true question. Cousin R's whole practice, as his albums show, is labelling specimens correctly, with date and place. He did not extort the man and did not covet what he wore. He wanted him composed and lit so that what he had spent eleven years hiding would be plain to whoever next opened that door — nothing asked of him, nothing taken from him. What that devotion was, and to whom it ran, is the household's own affair and none of this Brief's; what it drove a watching man to do is entirely mine, and I have charged Cousin R with it. The third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the file may now close.

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