Summary. It was the niece, Effie, and the money did it — or rather the want of money, and the clock that had just stopped running in her favour. The Colonel signed his new will that afternoon and told the house the matter was settled for good; by half past nine that evening she had decided it would be settled her way instead, and by twenty past ten it was.

The Reckoning. The manner of it was plain enough once the room was looked at properly. Effie took her uncle's glass from the footman's tray at the door and carried it the few feet to his elbow herself, and in that short walk the laudanum went in — her own, bought in Candle Street and borrowed besides from Captain Frew, and no great quantity required for a man his age and build. She saw him seated apart from the rows, facing the piano and not the company, which is where a host's chair is put as a courtesy and happened also to serve very well as a blind. The lamps went low, the music started, and for eighty minutes the whole room sat obediently looking the other way. At twenty past ten she rose to settle a cushion behind his head, as a dutiful niece will for an uncle who seems to be dozing, and in the two minutes that took she pressed that same cushion over his face until the matter was finished. Then she went back to the stool and played to the end of the programme. The phial went into the fire-basket on her way past the hearth. Nothing was brought into that room that did not belong there, and nothing was left arranged for effect; it is, I find, generally the plainest murders that take the longest to see, because one keeps looking for the clever part.

The others fall away on the evidence and not on character, which is as it should be. Nan stood at the girl's shoulder turning pages the whole evening under everybody's eye and never had the glass in her hand at any point — it went from the footman to Effie and nowhere else. Wat sat the full eighty minutes beside Quill, with Cousin R by the door vouching for both, and he too never came near the glass; and in any case his own allowance from the Colonel was running as usual and he had said as much himself, within Mrs Gow's hearing, that the old man was good for years yet — a man content with his income does not generally hasten his creditor into the grave. Cousin R sat the evening by the door with his eyes open and nothing to gain but a photograph he was prepared to ask for again in the spring. Quill never left his chair either, and his own laudanum sat locked in the hall cupboard the whole time, with Mrs Gow keeping that hall and nobody going near it. Lavinia, who notices such things, was the one who told me that of the whole company only Effie had spent the evening with her eyes on the Colonel's face — which I took, once I had the rest of it, for the plainest evidence in the file, though she did not mean it that way.

The want was real enough and had been building for a twelvemonth. She owed close on two hundred pounds about the town, chiefly to the Candle Street chemist and to Wat himself, who had already cut off her credit that month. The Colonel was the one purse left open to her, and he had just shut it, by his own word at the table, for good and all. A living man who will not pay is merely an inconvenience; a dead man's estate pays once and pays in full. What she owed, and to whom, and for what comfort, is her own unhappy business and none of mine to parade in a police file; it is enough to say the debt was real, the clock had run out, and she could not wait for nature to settle the account in its own time.

I have charged her accordingly. It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, that I have carried a warrant up that same drive, and I confess I had hoped, this once, to be spared the climb.

Effie took laudanum up from the hall
The Colonel received it, and answered no call
She crossed with a cushion, composed and polite
Then played till the clock made an end of the night
The moral, we vow, is to shun every vice
Though money and minutes are terribly nice