And you have nothing more immediate than your topography to offer,"
said Brain, with a sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"

"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole in
the Wall."

* * *

That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and under a strong
west wind that followed the breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane was
wending his way in a wild rotatory walk round and round the high,
continuous wall that inclosed the little wood. He was driven by a
desperate idea of solving for himself the riddle that had clouded
his reputation and already even threatened his liberty. The police
authorities, now in charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but
he knew well enough that if he tried to move far afield he would be
instantly arrested. Horne Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had
refused to expand them as yet, had stirred the artistic temperament
of the architect to a sort of wild analysis, and he was resolved to
read the hieroglyph upside down and every way until it made sense.
If it was something connected with a hole in the wall he would find
the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to
find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge told
him that the masonry was all of one workmanship and one date, and,
except for the regular entrance, which threw no light on the
mystery, he found nothing suggesting any sort of hiding place or
means of escape. Walking a narrow path between the winding wall and
the wild eastward bend and sweep of the gray and feathery trees,
seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like
lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and
mingling with the first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened
moon behind him, he began to feel his head going round as his heels
were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier. He had
thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension
which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from
a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical
light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he
could see Bulmer's body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid
halo over the woods and the wall. He was haunted also with the hint,
which somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all had
something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed even to be something
creepy in the fact that he was a