ng to do with it. It was me
that killed him. Let him go, and put me in his place."

He held his hands outstretched with the wrists together as though waiting
for the handcuffs to be placed on them.

CHAPTER XXXIII

An hour after the trial Crewe entered the chambers of Mr. Walters, K.C.

"I congratulate you on the way you handled him in the witness-box," said
Crewe, who was warmly welcomed by the barrister. "You did splendidly to
get it all out of him--and so dramatically too."

"I think it is you who deserves all the congratulations," replied
Walters. "If it had not been for you there would not have been such a
sensational development at the trial and in all probability Kemp's
evidence would have got Holymead off."

"Yes, I'm glad to think that Holymead would have got off even if I hadn't
seen through Kemp," replied Crewe thoughtfully. "I made a bad mistake in
being so confident that he was the guilty man."

"The completeness of the circumstantial evidence against him was
extraordinary," said Walters, to whom the legal aspects of the case
appealed. "Personally I am inclined to blame Holymead himself for the
predicament in which he was placed. If he had gone to the police after
the murder was discovered, told them the story of his visit to Sir Horace
that night, and invited investigation into the truth of it, all would
have been well."

"No," said Crewe in a voice which indicated a determination not to have
himself absolved at the expense of another. "The fact that he did not do
what he ought to have done does not mitigate my sin of having had the
wrong man arrested. The mistake I made was in not going to see him before
the warrant was taken out. If I had had a quiet talk with him I think I
would have been able to discover a flaw in my case against him. What
made me confident it was flawless was the fact that both his wife and her
French cousin believed him to be guilty. Mademoiselle Chiron followed
Holymead from the country on the 18th of August with the intention of
averting a tragedy. She arrived at Riversbrook too late for that, but in
time to see Sir Horace expire, and naturally she thought that Holymead
had shot him. When Mrs. Holymead realised that I also suspected her
husband and had accumulated some evidence against him, she sent
Mademoiselle Chiron to me with a concocted story of how the murder had
been committed by a more or less mythical husband belonging to
Mademoiselle's past. Ostensibly th