l come to eat Protestants."

"No," said the priest dispassionately; "I know who it was."

Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,
described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was
a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and
the other a devil....

The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
"You are a most extraordinary witness," he said; "but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,
who was the man you saw in the passage?"

"He was myself," said Father Brown.

Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: "Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?" And then,
without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
"You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime
was committed with a short blade?"

"A short blade," assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, "but a
very long hilt."

Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had
really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt
(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried
on to explain.

"I mean daggers aren't the only things with short blades. Spears
have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like
daggers, if they're that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like
the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she'd sent
for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God
forgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He
couldn't bear what he'd done."

The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still
looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel
for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.

"If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear," said Butler, "he
must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?" He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.

"The poor lady's dress was torn," said the witness, "because i