grim discovery in the attic.

With yet a fresh shock so that he reeled as he stood with the impact of
the thought, Dunn realized that all this implied that every one of his
precautions had been rendered futile that of all his elaborate plans not
one would take effect since all had been entrusted to the care of the
very man against whom they were aimed.

It was Walter for whom the net had been laid in Ottam's Wood; and Walter
to whom had been entrusted the task of drawing that net tight at the
right moment.

It was Walter's friends and agents who were to break into Wreste
Abbey, and Walter to whom had been entrusted the task of defeating and
capturing them. It was Walter from whom Ella stood in most danger if her
action that morning had been observed, and it was Walter to whom he had
given the task of protecting her.

At this thought, he turned and began to run as fast as he could in the
direction of Bittermeads.

At all costs she must be saved, she who had exposed the whole awful
plot. For a hundred yards or so he fled, swift as the wind, till on a
sudden he stopped dead with the realization of the fact that every yard
he took that way took him further and further from Ottam's Wood.

For there was danger there, too--grim and imminent--and sentences
in Ella's hasty letter that bore now to his new knowledge a deep
significance she had not dreamed of.

As when a flash of lightning lights all the landscape up and shows the
traveller dreadful dangers that beset his path, so a wave of intuition
told Dunn clearly the whole conspiracy; so that he saw it all, and
saw how every detail was to be fitted in together. His father, General
Dunsmore, was to be murdered first at the Brook Bourne Spring, to which
he was being lured; and afterwards, when Dunn arrived, he was to be
murdered, too. And on him, dead and unable to defend himself, the
blame of his father's death would be laid. It would not be difficult to
manage. Walter would arrange it all as neatly as he had been accustomed
to arrange the Dunsmore business affairs placed in his hands for
settlement.

A forged letter or two, Dunn's own revolver used to shoot the old man
with and then placed in Dunn's dead hand when his own turn had come,
convincing detail like that would be easy to arrange. Why, the very
fact of his disguise, the tangled beard that he had grown to hide his
features with, would appear conclusive. Any coroner's jury would return
a verdict of wilful murd