come from Christopher Quarles and myself.




CHAPTER III

THE DELVERTON AFFAIR


After our experience at Whiteladies Christopher Quarles went into
Devonshire. He declared that excitement of that kind was a little too
much for a man of his years and he must take a long rest to recuperate
and get his nerves in order. Under no circumstances whatever was I to
bother him with any problems. Had I been able to do so I should have gone
away too. Sir Michael Lavory had succeeded in giving me the jumps. In her
letters Zena told me the professor was playing golf, and knowing
something of him as a golfer, I rather pitied the men he induced to play
with him. It was not so much that he was a very bad player, it was the
peculiar twist in his brain which convinced him that he was a good one.
To give him a hint was to raise his anger at once.

One morning I received a letter from him, two pages of golf talk, in
which he opined he was playing at about five handicap--pure imagination,
of course, because he never kept a card and didn't count his foozled
shots--and then he came to the _raison d'etre_ of his letter.

"I want you to look up a case," he wrote. "It happened about three years
ago. A man named Farrell, partner in the firm of Delverton Brothers of
Austin Friars, was found dead in his office. An open verdict was