of his pencil an architect can
condemn a house to become the scene of a murder, as surely as he can
make it a convenient or inconvenient dwelling. Your house was
constructed to hide a secret. And I was not only sure that it did hide
one, but that it hid one which was in some way connected with the crime
in the garden."

"I have had some experience of that instinct of yours," the inspector
remarked, with a somewhat rueful smile.

"Well," said Copplestone, "instinct or no instinct, it certainly did
hide a secret, and that secret was that Oscar Winslowe lived in it--if
his condition could be called living. For the last five years he had
been practically a helpless imbecile. He seldom uttered a sound beyond a
gibber, and hardly seemed to be conscious. He was suffering the natural
consequences of his vices. He had been gradually reaching that
condition since nature had dealt him her first stroke of vengeance more
than thirty years ago. One by one his faculties had rotted. He was a
living mass of decay."

"It was a sure thing," the doctor said. "Such a condition was bound to
come. I prophesied it to his face when I first knew him."

"That was the secret of my house," Copplestone proceeded. "My own secret
was that I believed myself to be his son--the inheritor of the curse
that really belonged to Tranter. And the horror of it, the helplessness,
the constant contemplation of the awful state of the man I knew as my
father, and the morbid certainty that sooner or later I must come to the
same state, actually drove me to the madness that was not really in me
at all."

"But how had you come to believe yourself to be his son?" the inspector
asked.

"That was the last of Winslowe's diabolical acts. He inherited a large
fortune on condition that a child of his, to whom it could succeed, was
alive at the time of the testator's death. He did not know anything of
his own child, and did not want to. He was afraid that if he made
public inquiries for it, he might learn publicly that it was dead, and
lose his claim. Also, he was afraid of other complications and
exposures."

"And with good reason," said the doctor grimly.

"He wanted a child of five to produce as his son, George Copplestone
Winslowe--and possibly make away with in due course after the business
was settled. I am quite sure that would have been my fate if nature had
not come to my rescue by striking him. He knew, from his knowledge of
the underworld of London, how