Summary. It was Fifi, and not for money but for blood kept closer than money — her twin's secret, not her own, was the thing Wat Frew had got hold of, and she put him down in the dark corridor the moment she understood whose ledger he meant to open next.

The Reckoning. The method wanted no great cunning, only patience and a dark passage. The counterweight from the fruit-scales, near two pounds of brass and sitting always to hand on the bench, went missing from its cradle that evening and was never found; the scales stood crooked afterward, one pan empty, which told me plainly enough what had left the bench and not returned to it. The corridor lamp, kept lit as a matter of household habit, had been turned down to nothing — someone had done that deliberately, to make a blind place of a passage that was otherwise plain to see along. Wat came through it carrying a gift-basket toward the back stair, as was his habit that evening, and somebody waiting for him in the dark brought the brass down once, hard, and left him among his scattered lemons. She did not take his pocketbook, which lay full of notes beside him; this was never a robbery, whatever the household first assumed of a man who traded in blackmail and had doubtless made enemies of half the house.

The hat under the potting bench is the sort of thing a man likes to seize on — unexplained, out of place, inviting a story of disguise or mistaken identity. It is nothing of the kind. It is one of the loose hats kept by the garden door for errands, and any servant crossing the cold that evening might have caught it up and dropped it again. I mention it only to set it down and leave it there; it signed nothing and staged nothing, and I have wasted an afternoon on lesser objects than that one.

As for the rest of the house, they fall away almost gently, each fixed in his place by someone else's eye. Zane, the twin whose secret was at the heart of it, was laying the supper table the whole evening under the continuous watch of the butler and two maids; he could not have been in that corridor when the lamp went dark, and I was glad of it, for a man ought not to hang for his sister's hand. Xerxes sat the evening through at the head of the card table with Aziz at his elbow and two servants beside them, and in any case Wat living was worth money to him; a man does not commonly strike down his own trade. Aziz never left that same elbow, and the thing that might have moved him — pressure laid on his own master — had not in fact occurred, Wat's new leverage having turned toward Zane and nowhere near Xerxes. Lavinia was upstairs giving Effie her sitting from eight o'clock, the maid finding them both there with the tea at nine. Nan sat with the Colonel over the venture papers, a footman in continuous attendance upon them both. Cousin R was alone in the library with his cards and his ink, and rang twice for more of it, the bell answered each time; and a man of his fastidiousness is not one to arrange his murders among spilled lemons.

What drove her, in the end, was a kind of commerce she understood better than most in that house — she dealt in other people's business as freely as Wat did, and I do not doubt she had sold a secret or two of her own in her time. But the one confidence in that household not for sale was her brother's, and when Wat's pressing turned from her to him, the woman who trafficked in everyone else's affairs became, for once, the one thing standing between her blood and the ruin he intended. She lifted the counterweight, lowered the lamp, and waited. I have charged her accordingly; it is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I am tired of totting them up.

Fifi, with manners, made ready the room,
While Wat brought a basket through corridor gloom.
One thump in the darkness, one scale out of trim,
And nobody mentioned the matter to him.
The moral is caution, as all may agree;
We shall practise it later, at half-past three.