tell you who murdered
him. That woman murdered him. She first ruined his life, and now she
has killed him. For the last five years she has been plotting to make
herself his wife, and last night, when he told her he had discovered
the truth about the Russian, and that she would never see him again, she
flew into a passion and stabbed him, and then, in terror of the gallows,
killed herself. She murdered him, I tell you, and I promise you that we
will find the knife she used near her--perhaps still in her hand. What
will you say to that?'

"Lyle turned his head away and stared down at the floor. 'I might say,'
he answered, 'that you placed it there.'

"Arthur gave a cry of anger and sprang at him, and then pitched forward
into his arms. The blood was running from the cut under the bandage, and
he had fainted. Lyle carried him back to the bed again, and we left him
with the police and the doctors, and drove at once to the address he had
given us. We found the house not three minutes' walk from St. George's
Hospital. It stands in Trevor Terrace, that little row of houses set
back from Knightsbridge, with one end in Hill Street.

"As we left the hospital Lyle had said to me, 'You must not blame me for
treating him as I did. All is fair in this work, and if by angering that
boy I could have made him commit himself I was right in trying to do so;
though, I assure you, no one would be better pleased than myself if I
could prove his theory to be correct. But we cannot tell. Everything
depends upon what we see for ourselves within the next few minutes.'

"When we reached the house, Lyle broke open the fastenings of one of the
windows on the ground floor, and, hidden by the trees in the garden, we
scrambled in. We found ourselves in the reception-room, which was the
first room on the right of the hall. The gas was still burning behind
the colored glass and red silk shades, and when the daylight streamed in
after us it gave the hall a hideously dissipated look, like the foyer of
a theatre at a matinee, or the entrance to an all-day gambling hell. The
house was oppressively silent, and because we knew why it was so silent
we spoke in whispers. When Lyle turned the handle of the drawing-room
door, I felt as though some one had put his hand upon my throat. But
I followed close at his shoulder, and saw, in the subdued light of
many-tinted lamps, the body of Chetney at the foot of the divan, just as
Lieutenant Sears had described it.