The Ashiel mystery

When Sir Arthur Byrne fell ill, after three summers at his post in the little consulate that overlooked the lonely waters of the Black Sea, he applied for sick leave. Having obt...

One hot summer day, a few months after the marriage, Juliet, returning to the consulate after a morning spent in very active exercise upon a tennis court, was met on the doorste...

"Oh yes, Miss Juliet Byrne," he said when Juliet had told him her name. "Mr. Findlay is expecting you. Will you walk upstairs, Miss Byrne, please. I think you have an appointmen...

On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through which she had been conversing with Lord Ashiel, hurried out to see what Bond Street could provide her wit...

"Thank you," said the lady, taking the seat he offered. "I hope I do not disturb you; but I have come on business," she added, as the door closed behind Higgs.

Lord Ashiel spoke in a voice scarcely above a whisper, and Juliet crouched low against the peaty wall of the butt. There was an instant's silence, and then crack, crack, shots s...

It was a few days after this that Gimblet, taking up an evening paper at the Club, was startled to see a sinister headline of "Murder," immediately followed by the name of Ashiel.

They had reached a place where a wide horseshoe of beach ran down to the loch. For more than a week there had been no rain to speak of. The season as a whole had been dry, and t...

calmly; and, if my tears flowed, they were not the only ones that were shed. For a few moments we cried like babies, in each other's arms, and then I pulled myself together, for...

"The next thing I remember, was finding myself lying on the floor, and, when I tried to get up, seeing everything in the room swinging about me like the swinging boats at a fair...

Mark took him first to his uncle's bedroom; a room austere in its simplicity, with bare white-washed walls and uncarpeted floor. No one could have hidden a sheet of paper in tha...

"I'm sure I wish, sir," said the man, "that you could prove he never did it. A very nice young gentleman, sir, Sir David has always been; it seems dreadful to think of him lifti...

All the afternoon she had possessed her soul in what patience she could muster, which was not a great deal. Still, by dint of repeating to herself that she must give the detecti...

By the time he reached the castle, the night was dark indeed. He approached it by the path along the burn, and felt his way cautiously up the steep zigzags of the hill, and past...

For two hours before breakfast he wrestled with the cryptic message on the sheet of paper, trying first one way and then another of solving the riddle it presented, but still fi...

Blanston, to whom he appealed, could give no useful information. Yes, some of the plate was old, but that was all at the bank in London. Mrs. Haviland, his lordship's sister, ha...

With her white paint and her scarlet smokestack, the _Inverashiel_--one of the two small steamers that during the summer months plied up and down the loch, and incidentally carr...

Behind the shrubberies, which lay at the back of the holly hedge that surrounded the little enclosed garden outside the library, beyond the end of the battlements, and reached b...

Later on in the afternoon, when Gimblet arrived at the castle, he was immediately shown into the presence of Lord Ashiel, who was pacing the smoking-room restlessly, a cigarette...

When Juliet, incensed and indignant at the Russian's behaviour, discovered the door in the clock and was on the point of opening it and making her presence known, a noise of ste...

It did not occur to Juliet to deny that she had overheard their talk. She had been found in the act of spying on them, and it was inconceivable that they should believe she had...

Juliet dug her nails into the cracks of the stone floor with all the energy of despair, but in a moment her feet were over the edge of the pit and she was falling. Her fingers g...

It was after dinner that night, as he sat in the little drawing-room of the cottage with Lady Ruth and Sir Arthur, that his hostess asked him to explain to them how he had contr...

Sir Arthur Byrne took his adopted daughter back to Belgium on the following day, since, although she would have to return to England to give evidence against Mark in due course,...