The White Lie

IS MAINLY MYSTERIOUS. A woman – perhaps? Who knows! Poor Dick Harborne was certainly a man of secrets, and of many adventures. Well, it certainly is a most mysterious affair. You, my dear Barclay, appear to be the last person to have spoken to him. Apparently I was, replied Lieutenant Noel Barclay, of the Naval Flying Corps, a tall, slim, good-looking, clean-shaven man in aviator's garb, and wearing a thick woollen muffler and a brown leather cap with rolls at the ears, as he walked one August afternoon up the village street of Mundesley-on-Sea, in Norfolk, a quaint, old-world street swept by the fresh breeze of the North Sea. Yesterday I flew over here from Yarmouth to see the cable-laying, and met Dick in the post-office. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. We were shipmates in the Antrim before he retired from the service and went abroad. Came into money, I suppose? remarked his companion, Francis Goring, a long-legged, middle-aged man, who, in a suit of well-worn tweeds, presented the ideal type of the English landowner, as indeed he was – owner of Keswick Hall, a fine place a few miles distant, and a Justice of the Peace for the county of Norfolk