. He seemed a sort of bottomless
Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for
many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at the head of
England's Secret Service at Scotland Yard.

A servant brought out the tea and we were alone on the grass terrace
before the great oak-trees. He remained for some moments in reflection,
then he replied:

"Do you mean the mystery of his death?"

"Was there any other mystery?" I said.

He looked at me narrowly across the table.

"There was hardly any mystery about his death," he said. "The man shot
himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above the mantel in his
library. The family, when they found him, put the pistol back on the
nail and fitted the affair with the stock properties of a mysterious
assassin.

"The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in the public
mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after his career, should by
every canon of the tragic muse, go that way."

He made a careless gesture with his fingers.

"I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had been moved,
the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powder marks on the
muzzle.

"But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny of the
man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all fated, as the
Gaelic people say.... I saw no reason to disturb it."

"Then there was some other mystery?" I ventured.

He nodded his big head slowly.

"There is an ancient belief," he said, "that the hunted thing always
turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this world on whom the
hunted thing awfully turned, it was St. Alban."

He put out his hand.

"Look at the shaft yonder," he said, "lifted to his memory, towering
over the whole of this English country, and cut on its base with his
services to England and the brave words he said on that fatal morning on
the Channel boat. Every schoolboy knows the words:

"'Don't threaten, fire if you like!'

"First-class words for the English people to remember. No bravado, just
the thing any decent chap would say. But the words are persistent. They
remain in the memory. And it was a thrilling scene they fitted into.
One must never forge that: The little hospital transport lying in the
Channel in a choppy sea that ran streaks of foam; the grim turret and
the long whaleback of a U-boat in the foam scruff; and the sun lying on
the scrubbed deck of the jumping transport.

"Everybody