or, "please don't put him about at all, Sir Arthur. The last
thing we should wish would be to put the family to any inconvenience or
unpleasantness, and I am sure Dr. Saunders will arrange that the inquest
will be as private and quiet as possible."

And so it was, but, somehow, the ghastly truth of it all leaked out, and
for a week after the inquest the horrible story of Sir Reginald's crime
and its consequences made sport of the daintiest kind for the readers
of the gutter rags, those microbes of journalism, which, like those of
cancer and consumption, can only live on the corruption or decay of the
body-corporate of Society.

Only one name and one fact never came out, and that was due to Ernest
Reed's uncompromising declaration that he would shoot any man who said
anything in print about the identity of Carol Vane with the daughter of
Sir Reginald Garthorne's victim. He worked by telegraph and otherwise
for twenty-four hours on end, and the result was that his brother
pressmen all over the country, being mostly gentlemen, recognised the
chivalry of his attempt, and so chivalrously suppressed that part of the
truth. And so effectually was it suppressed, that it was not until about
a year afterwards that Mr. Ernest Reed found a rather difficult
matrimonial puzzle solved for him by the receipt of Mr. Cecil Rayburn's
cheque for a thousand pounds.

EPILOGUE.

A little more than a year had passed since the inquest on Sir Reginald
and Koda Bux. For Vane Maxwell, the Missionary to Midas, as every one
now called him, it had been a continued series of tribulations and
triumphs. From Land's End to John o' Groats, and from Cork Harbour to
Aberdeen he had preached the Gospel that he had found in the Sermon on
the Mount. He had, in truth, proved himself to be the Savonarola of the
twentieth century, not only in words, but also in the effects of his
teaching.

He had asked tens and hundreds of thousands of professing Christians,
just as he had asked the congregation of St. Chrysostom, to choose
honestly between their creed and their wealth, to be honest, as he had
said then, with themselves or with God; to choose openly and in the face
of all men between the service of God and of Mammon. And his appeal had
been answered throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Never since the days of John Wesley had there been such a re-awakening
of religious, really religious, feeling in the country. Just as the rich
Italians