's confession of suicide lay on the front
table, while Quinton lay alive but asleep in the conservatory
beyond.

The last act was a desperate one; you can guess it: I pretended
to have seen Quinton dead and rushed to his room. I delayed you
with the paper, and, being a quick man with my hands, killed
Quinton while you were looking at his confession of suicide. He
was half-asleep, being drugged, and I put his own hand on the
knife and drove it into his body. The knife was of so queer a
shape that no one but an operator could have calculated the angle
that would reach his heart. I wonder if you noticed this.

When I had done it, the extraordinary thing happened. Nature
deserted me. I felt ill. I felt just as if I had done something
wrong. I think my brain is breaking up; I feel some sort of
desperate pleasure in thinking I have told the thing to somebody;
that I shall not have to be alone with it if I marry and have
children. What is the matter with me?... Madness... or can one
have remorse, just as if one were in Byron's poems! I cannot
write any more.

James Erskine Harris.

Father Brown carefully folded up the letter, and put it in his breast
pocket just as there came a loud peal at the gate bell, and the wet
waterproofs of several policemen gleamed in the road outside.

The Sins of Prince Saradine

When Flambeau took his month's holiday from his office in Westminster
he took it in a small sailing-boat, so small that it passed much of its
time as a rowing-boat. He took it, moreover, in little rivers in the
Eastern counties, rivers so small that the boat looked like a magic
boat, sailing on land through meadows and cornfields. The vessel was
just comfortable for two people; there was room only for necessities,
and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his special philosophy
considered necessary. They reduced themselves, apparently, to four
essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers,
if he should want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he
should faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die. With this
light luggage he crawled down the little Norfolk rivers, intending to
reach the Broads at last, but meanwhile delighting in the overhanging
gardens and meadows, the mirrored mansions or villages, lingering to
fish in the pools and corners, and in some sense h