the effects.
Ransford had been in the court from the outset of the proceedings, and
when the medical evidence had been given he was called. Bryce, watching
him narrowly, saw that he was suffering from repressed excitement--and
that that excitement was as much due to anger as to anything else. His
face was set and stern, and he looked at the Coroner with an expression
which portended something not precisely clear at that moment. Bryce,
trying to analyse it, said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised
if a scene followed--Ransford looked like a man who is bursting to
say something in no unmistakable fashion. But at first he answered the
questions put to him calmly and decisively.

"When this man's clothing was searched," observed the Coroner, "a box
of pills was found, Dr. Ransford, on which your writing appears. Had you
been attending him--professionally?"

"Yes," replied Ransford. "Both Collishaw and his wife. Or, rather, to
be exact, I had been in attendance on the wife, for some weeks. A day
or two before his death, Collishaw complained to me of indigestion,
following on his meals. I gave him some digestive pills--the pills you
speak of, no doubt."

"These?" asked the Coroner, passing over the box which Mitchington had
found.

"Precisely!" agreed Ransford. "That, at any rate, is the box, and I
suppose those to be the pills."

"You made them up yourself?" inquired the Coroner.

"I did--I dispense all my own medicines."

"Is it possible that the poison we have beard of, just now, could get
into one of those pills--by accident?"

"Utterly impossible!--under my hands, at any rate," answered Ransford.

"Still, I suppose, it could have been administered in a pill?" suggested
the Coroner.

"It might," agreed Ransford. "But," he added, with a significant
glance at the medical men who had just given evidence. "It was not so
administered in this case, as the previous witnesses very well know!"

The Coroner looked round him, and waited a moment.

"You are at liberty to explain--that last remark," he said at last.
"That is--if you wish to do so." "Certainly!" answered Ransford, with
alacrity. "Those pills are, as you will observe, coated, and the man
would swallow them whole--immediately after his food. Now, it would
take some little time for a pill to dissolve, to disintegrate, to be
digested. If Collishaw took one of my pills as soon as he had eaten his
dinner, according to instructions, and if poison had been