The Middle Temple Murder

At precisely ten o’clock that evening Viner read the last page of a novel which had proved to be exactly suited to his aunt’s tastes. A dead silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackling of the logs in the grate. Aunt Bethia dropped her knitting on her silk-gowned knees and stared at the leaping flames; her nephew, with an odd glance at her, rose from his easy-chair, picked up a pipe and began to fill it from a tobacco-jar on the mantelpiece. The clock had ticked several times before she spoke. “Well!” she said, with the accompanying sigh which denotes complete content. “So he did it! Now, I should never have thought it! The last person of the whole lot! Clever…very clever! Richard, you’ll get all the books that man has written!”