of smoke or of burning on the face.
The wound was absolutely clean, and was already ceasing to bleed
outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning up the points in the
crushing case against me.

"I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him--so he
had lied to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler--to go
with me for the drive from which he never returned. My pistol had killed
him. It was true that by discovering his plot I had saved myself from
heaping up further incriminating facts--flight, concealment, the
possession of the treasure. But what need of them, after all? As I
stood, what hope was there? What could I do?"

Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. "I
want," he said very earnestly, "to try to make you understand what was
in my mind when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won't be bored,
because I must do it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool. But
after all the police never suspected me. I walked that green for a
quarter of an hour, I suppose, thinking the thing out like a game of
chess. I had to think ahead and think coolly; for my safety depended on
upsetting the plans of one of the longest-headed men who ever lived. And
remember that, for all I knew, there were details of the scheme still
hidden from me, waiting to crush me.

"Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I
thought, would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do
the completely straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my
story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power
of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw
myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself,
boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported
tale as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against
a man who had never, so far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At
every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His careful
concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature of the
stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done it. You
can see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would appear, in
the shadow of Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself
telling such a story to the counsel for my defense. I could see the face
with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his
tho