“Yes,” he agreed thoughtfully, “yet every self-murderer has a real or fancied reason for quitting the world, and there is apparently no reason why any of these six poor ones who hurled themselves into outer darkness during the past week should have done so. All, apparently, were well provided for, none of them, as far as is known, had any reason to regret the past or fear the future; yet”—he shrugged his narrow shoulders significantly—“voilà, they are gone!

“Another thing: At the Faculté de Médicine Légal and the Sûreté in Paris we keep most careful statistics, not only on the number, but on the manner of suicides. I do not think your Frenchman differs radically from your American when it comes to taking his life, so the figures for one nation may well be a signpost for the other. These self-inflicted deaths, they are not right. They do not follow the rules. Men prefer to hang, slash or shoot themselves; women favor drowning, poison or gas; yet here we have one of the men taking poison, one of the women hanging herself, and three of them jumping to death. Nom d’un canard, I am not satisfied with it!”

“H’m, neither are the unfortunate parties who killed themselves, if the theologians are to be believed,” I returned.

“You speak right,” he returned, then muttered dreamily to himself: “Destruction—destruction of body and imperilment of soul—mordieu, it is strange, it is not righteous!” He disposed of his coffee at a gulp and leaped from his chair. “I go!” he declared dramatically, turning toward the door.

“Where?”

“Where? Where should I go, if not to secure the history of these so puzzling cases? I shall not rest nor sleep nor eat until I have the string of the mystery’s skein in my hands.” He paused at the door, a quick, elfin smile playing across his usually stem features. “And should I return before my work is complete,” he suggested, “I pray you have the excellent Nora prepare another of her so magnificent apple pies for dinner.”

Forty seconds later the front door clicked shut, and from the dining room’s oriel window I saw his neat little figure, trimly encased in blue chinchilla and gray worsted, pass quickly down the sidewalk, his ebony cane hammering a rapid tattoo on the stones as it kept time to the thoughts racing through his active brain.

“I am desolated that my capacity is exhausted,” he announced that evening as he finished his third portion of deep-dish apple pie smothered in pungent rum sauce and regarded his empty plate sadly. “Eh bien, perhaps it is as well. Did I eat more I might not be able to think clearly, and clear thought is what I shall need this night, my friend. Come; we must be going.”

“Going where?” I demanded.

“To hear the reverend and estimable Monsieur Maundy deliver his sermon.”

“Who? Everard Maundy?”