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We are keeping the corpse waiting. Mary Stokes says it was a young woman, and a stranger, with fair hair and a shocking wound on the head. She was quite sure anyone with a wound like that must be dead. She says the hair hung down and hid the face a good deal. She described the clothes—a black coat, black gloves, no hat, and—here’s the thing that has us all intrigued—one earring, and a rather peculiar one at that.”
    Miss Silver coughed.
    “She seems to have seen a good deal. You say she stated that the girl’s hair was falling all about her face. It seems strange that she should have been able to see an earring.”
    “It’s a lot stranger than that. She says the man turned the girl over and looked for the other earring, and it wasn’t there. She said he looked for it like a madman, turning the beam this way and that, feeling in the hair.”
    Miss Silver said, “How extremely shocking!”
    “Well, it is rather. When he couldn’t find it he left the body lying there and went back into the wood, and Mary Stokes came out from behind her bush and ran for her life. Well, we got the local constable, a good hearty chap, and we went up to view the spot. Mary went faint on us, so I went back to Abbottsleigh and fetched my car. That’s how I know what the track is like to drive on—I’m one of the fools who’ve done it. When we got Mary there, there wasn’t any corpse. She went on being faint in spite of a pretty nipping air, and when it came to trying to fix the spot she didn’t seem to have any ideas on the subject. Just said she’d got well along into the Copse, but not far in and she wasn’t nearly clear of it, but it was too dark to say for certain, and oh, please couldn’t she go home to Uncle, and a lot more of that kind of thing and more tears. I said no, she couldn’t, and then a County Inspector rolled up from Lenton, and he said so too. Well, we searched the place from end to end, and neither then nor next day when we went over it by daylight was there the slightest sign of anything having been dragged through the bushes at the side of the path. On the wood side there’s the sort of ditch which ought to show footprints—soft sides and a muddy bottom. And nothing you could swear to from one end to the other except Mary’s own footprints where there’s a sort of gap and the remains of a track going off into the wood. No sign of anything being dragged there either. It looks as if Mary had come down on to the path from the bushes like she says and then come running back again. The two best prints are certainly those of running feet—the toe very deeply marked and scarcely a trace of the heel. That was the only corroboration of her story until this afternoon. There was no corpse on the path or in the wood, and no sign of one ever having been there. There was no one missing from the neighbourhood. There was no stray earring.”
    Miss Silver coughed.
    “The other one of the pair, which I think you described as peculiar. ”
    “Well, it was. You know the kind of ring they call an eternity ring?”
    She smiled.
    “An old fashion which has come back—a circle of small stones set continuously. Extremely pretty but not very practical. The stones are sadly apt to fall out.”
    “You know everything—I’ve always said so. But have you ever seen an earring like that?”
    “No, indeed. It would be very difficult to arrange, would it not? You see, an earring would have to open on a hinge, or it could not be passed through the ear.”
    He laughed.
    “I didn’t think of that. But I suppose it could be managed. Anyhow Mary Stokes swears, and sticks to it, that what she saw in the corpse’s ear was an eternity ring set with diamonds.”
    Miss Silver continued to knit, her small, quite pleasing features composed, her air attentive. After a moment she said,
    “You have something more to tell me, I think.”
    He nodded.
    “When I tore myself away on Sunday night there were two major schools of thought in