at hand.
"Four minutes' thinking, and I can tell your whole story myself."

"All right," assented his friend. "You tell it."

Flambeau lifted his head, but lowered his voice. "General Sir Arthur St.
Clare," he said, "came of a family in which madness was hereditary; and
his whole aim was to keep this from his daughter, and even, if possible,
from his future son-in-law. Rightly or wrongly, he thought the final
collapse was close, and resolved on suicide. Yet ordinary suicide would
blazon the very idea he dreaded. As the campaign approached the clouds
came thicker on his brain; and at last in a mad moment he sacrificed his
public duty to his private. He rushed rashly into battle, hoping to fall
by the first shot. When he found that he had only attained capture and
discredit, the sealed bomb in his brain burst, and he broke his own
sword and hanged himself."

He stared firmly at the grey facade of forest in front of him, with the
one black gap in it, like the mouth of the grave, into which their path
plunged. Perhaps something menacing in the road thus suddenly swallowed
reinforced his vivid vision of the tragedy, for he shuddered.

"A horrid story," he said.

"A horrid story," repeated the priest with bent head. "But not the real
story."

Then he threw back his head with a sort of despair and cried: "Oh, I
wish it had been."

The tall Flambeau faced round and stared at him.

"Yours is a clean story," cried Father Brown, deeply moved. "A sweet,
pure, honest story, as open and white as that moon. Madness and despair
are innocent enough. There are worse things, Flambeau."

Flambeau looked up wildly at the moon thus invoked; and from where he
stood one black tree-bough curved across it exactly like a devil's horn.

"Father--father," cried Flambeau with the French gesture and stepping
yet more rapidly forward, "do you mean it was worse than that?"

"Worse than that," said Paul like a grave echo. And they plunged into
the black cloister of the woodland, which ran by them in a dim tapestry
of trunks, like one of the dark corridors in a dream.

They were soon in the most secret entrails of the wood, and felt close
about them foliage that they could not see, when the priest said again:

"Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do
if there is no forest?"

"Well, well," cried Flambeau irritably, "what does he do?"

"He grows a forest to hide it in," said the priest in an obscure voice.
"A