m Krevin had formally denounced
as the murderer of Wallingford. And as he hurried along he found himself
saying certain words over and over again, and still again....

"I'm not going to see a woman hang!--I'm not going to see a woman hang!
I'm ... not ... going ... to----"

Behind this suddenly aroused Quixotic sentiment he was sick with horror.
He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too,
that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in
danger. A feeling of almost physical nausea came over him as he
remembered the callous, brutal cynicism of Krevin's last words, "If it's
going to be my neck or hers, I prefer it to be hers!" A woman!--yet, a
murderess; the murderess of his cousin, whose death he had vowed to
avenge. But of course it was so--he saw many things now. The anxiety to
get the letters; the dread of publicity expressed to Peppermore; the
mystery spread over many things and actions; now this affair with
Mallett--there was no reason to doubt Krevin Crood's accusation. The
fragments of the puzzle had been pieced together.

But as he ran along that lane, and as his mental faculties regained
their normality Brent himself did some piecing together. Every word of
Krevin Crood's statement had bitten itself into his intelligence. Now he
could reconstruct. It seemed to him that he visualized the Mayor's
Parlour on that fateful evening. An angry, disillusioned, nerve-racked
man, sore and restive under the fancy, or, rather, the realization of
deceit, saying bitter and contemptuous words; a desperate, defeated
woman, cornered like a rat--and close to her hand the rapier, lying on
the old chest where its purchaser had carelessly flung it. A maddened
thing, man or woman, would snatch that up, and----

"Blind, uncontrollable impulse!" muttered Brent. "She struck _at_ him,
_at_ him--and then it was all over. Intentional, no! Yet ... the law!
But, by God, I won't have a hand in hanging ... a woman! Time?"

He knew the exact location of the door in the garden wall of the Abbey
House and presently he ran up to it, panting from his swift dash along
the lane. Not five minutes had elapsed then since his slip out of the
excited court. But every second of the coming minutes was precious. And
the door was locked.

The garden wall was eight feet high, and so built that on all the
expanse of its smoothed surface there was no foothold, no projection for
fingers to cling to. But Brent was