Summary. It was Aziz, the Moroccan gentleman of Mr Hartfield's household, and he did it not for gain nor out of any quarrel, but to silence a man who had learned something and asked nothing for the knowing of it; here is how I came to it, and the third such business I have closed this twelvemonth, by my count.

The Reckoning. Cousin R died by the blind-cord, cut from the gallery window with the Colonel's own nail-scissors, which lie on that sill for any dining guest to find. He was killed where Mrs Gow found him, in the window-chair, and the chair was turned afterward — not for effect, for there was no effect wanted, but so that he sat square between the gallery door and the smoking-room where Xerxes Hartfield took his cigar alone. The knot was reef-tied and badly, pulled twice over, the work of a man unpractised in the thing and in no state to be tidy about it. Mrs Gow saw Aziz pass the servants' passage at 9.12 without his gloves; they turned up after, damp at the palm, in the gallery umbrella-stand, where a man might drop them who had worn them to do a piece of work he did not care to feel with his bare hands and then thought better of leaving them on.

The house offered up its usual crop of likelier men, and each fell away on the same plain ground: continuous accounting by a witness the household trusts. The Colonel never left the dining room the whole window through, Dr Quill at his elbow and each vouching the other. Quill himself sat there too, and was in any case the man called to examine the body after, which a murderer manages badly if at all. Zane was pouring port and carrying coffee under two pairs of eyes without a break. Nan was counting linen with Mrs Gow from 8.35. Fifi was belowstairs at the glass with the second girl the whole time. Lavinia and Effie held each other's company at cards, with Zane's coffee at nine o'clock to mark the middle of it — and Effie besides would have wanted some flourish to the thing, some sign of her hand in it, where this was left bare as a board. Wat Frew was logged out the gate at 8.40 and aboard the Cormorant by nine-five, the walk being a clean half-hour, and could not have been in two places. And Xerxes, who had the readiest look of guilt about him, could not have crossed his own gallery and back without being the gloveless man Mrs Gow met at 9.12 — who was Aziz, not him — and no man arranges a body to shield a room he is sitting in himself.

As for the why of it, Cousin R kept his notebook the way some men keep accounts, initials only, and asked nothing of anybody for what he wrote there. He had stood in a doorway at Hartfield House on the Friday and watched Aziz read aloud to his master, and had said not a word, and had gone away and written what he saw. A man who wants money can be paid, and a man who wants to be flattered can be managed; Cousin R wanted neither, and that made him a thing Aziz could not calculate and would not risk. What Aziz is to Mr Hartfield is his own affair, and the household kept its own counsel on it long before I came to ask; what it drove him to is mine to set down. He did not kill for jealousy nor for coin. He killed because he loved where the world would not let him say so, and could not bear to gamble another man's safety on a stranger's silence he had no way to buy or to judge. I have charged him accordingly, and there is little more to add, save that I nearly forgot the gloves — but Mrs Gow did not, and neither, in the end, could he afford to.

Aziz made one small alteration before the night,
And Cousin R was found arranged with care just right.
The scissors rested quiet by the window-chair,
While household tongues observed the gloves were no longer there.
We vow that love should never make a person blind,
Then praise the very folly we have left behind.