me down. I opened both
doors, but she never came. Then I shut them very quietly--and utterly
lost my head. You know what I did. I don't remember doing half. It was
the stupid cunning of a real madman, the broken window, and the things
up the chimney. I got back as I had come, in the way that struck you as
possible when you were there, and I woke my landlady getting in. I
believe I told her everything on the spot, and that it was the last
sense I spoke for weeks; she nursed me day and night that I might never
tell anybody else."

So the story ended, and with it, as might have been expected, the
unnatural strength which had sustained the teller till the last; he had
used up every ounce of it, and he lay exhausted and collapsed. Langholm
became uneasy.

Severino could not swallow the champagne which Langholm poured into his
mouth.

Langholm fetched the candle in high alarm--higher yet at what it
revealed.

Severino was struggling to raise himself, a deadly leaden light upon his
face.

"Raise me up--raise me up."

Langholm raised him in his arms.

"Another--hemorrhage!" said Severino, in a gasping whisper.

And his blood dripped with the words.

Langholm propped him up and rushed out shouting for Brunton--for Mrs.
Brunton--for anybody in the house. Both were in, and the woman came up
bravely without a word.

"I'll go for the doctor myself," said Langholm. "I shall be quickest."

And he went on his bicycle, hatless, with an unlit lamp.

But the doctor came too late.

CHAPTER XXVIII

IN THE MATTER OF A MOTIVE

That was between eight and nine o'clock at night; before ten an
outrageous thought occurred to the man with the undisciplined
imagination. It closed his mind to the tragedy of an hour ago, to the
dead man lying upstairs, whose low and eager voice still went on and on
in his ears. It was a thought that possessed Langholm like an unclean
spirit from the moment in which he raised his eyes from the last words
of the manuscript to which the dead man had referred.

In the long, low room that Langholm lived in a fire was necessary in
damp weather, irrespective of the season. It was on the fire that his
eyes fell, straight from the paper in his hand ...

No one else had read it. There was an explicit assurance on the point.
The Chelsea landlady had no idea that such a statement was in existence;
she would certainly have destroyed it if she had known; and further
written details convinced Langho