an whether the jury had agreed on their verdict.

"What say you: guilty or not guilty?" asked the Associate in a hard
metallic voice in which there was no trace of interest in the answer.

"Not guilty," replied the foreman.

There was a muffled cheer from the gallery, which was suppressed by the
stentorian cry of the ushers, "Silence in the court!"

"A pack of damned fools," said the exasperated Inspector Chippenfield.

Rolfe understood that his chief referred to the jury, and he nodded the
assent of a subordinate.

CHAPTER XX

"Hill has bolted!"

Rolfe flung the words at Inspector Chippenfield in a tone which he was
unable to divest entirely of satisfaction. "Fancy his being the guilty
party after all," he added, with the tone of satisfaction still more
evident in his voice. "I often thought that he was our man, and that he
was playing with you--I mean with us."

Inspector Chippenfield had betrayed surprise at the news by dropping his
pen on the official report he was preparing. But it was in his usual tone
of cold official superiority that he replied:

"Do you mean that Hill, the principal witness in the Riversbrook murder
trial, has disappeared from London?"

"Disappeared from London? He's bolted clean out of the country by this
time, I tell you! Cleared out for good and left his unfortunate wife and
child to starve."

"How have you learnt this, Rolfe?"

"His wife told me herself. I went to the shop this afternoon to have a
few words with Hill and see how he felt after the way Holymead had gone
for him at the trial. His wife burst out crying when she saw me, and she
told me that her husband had cleared out last night after he came home
from court. The hardened scoundrel took with him the few pounds of her
savings which she kept in her bedroom, and had even emptied the contents
of the till of the few shillings and coppers it contained. All he left
were the half-pennies in the child's money-box. He cleared out in the
middle of the night after his wife had gone to bed. He left her a note
telling her she must get along without him. I have the note here--his
wife gave it to me."

Rolfe took a dirty scrap of paper out of his pocket-book and laid it
before Inspector Chippenfield. The paper was a half sheet torn from an
exercise-book, and its contents were written in faint lead pencil.
They read:

"Dear Mary:

"I have got to leave you. I have thought it out and this is the only
thing to do. I am