eady."

But there were thin cracks of light in the living-room window of the
lonely cottage on the Shawl, and the superintendent whispered that
somebody was certainly there and still up. He halted his companions
outside the garden gate and turned to Cotherstone.

"I don't know if it'll be advisable for you to be seen," he said. "I
think our best plan'll be for me to knock at the front door and ask for
the woman. You other two go round--quietly--to the back door, and take
care that nobody gets out that way to the moors at the back--if anybody
once escapes to those moors they're as good as lost for ever on a dark
night. Go round--and when you hear me knock at the front, you knock at
the back."

The two men slipped away round the corner of the garden and through the
adjacent belt of trees, and the superintendent gently lifted the latch
of the garden gate.

"You keep back, Mr. Cotherstone, when I go to the door," he said. "You
never know--hullo, what's this?"

Men were coming up the wood behind them, quietly but quickly. One of
them, ahead of the others, carried a bull's-eye lamp and in swinging it
about revealed himself as one of the superintendent's own officers. He
caught sight of his superior and came forward.

"Mr. Brereton's here, sir, and some gentlemen from Norcaster," he said.
"They want to see you particularly--something about this place, so I
brought them----"

It was at that moment that the sound of the two revolver shots rang out
in the silence from the stillness of the cottage. And at that the
superintendent dashed forward, with a cry to the others, and began to
beat on the front door, and while his men responded with similar
knockings at the back he called loudly on Miss Pett to open.

It was Mallalieu who at last flung the door open and confronted the
amazed and wondering group clustered thickly without. Every man there
shrank back affrighted at the desperation on the cornered man's face.
But Mallalieu did not shrink, and his hand was strangely steady as he
singled out his partner and shot him dead--and just as steady as he
stepped back and turned the revolver on himself.

A moment later the superintendent snatched the bull's-eye lamp from his
man, and stepped over Mallalieu's dead body and went into the
cottage--to come back on the instant shivering and sick with shock at
the sight his startled eyes had met.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE BARRISTER'S FEE

Six months later, on a fine evening whic