gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you
remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in
front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and
I did not care to tell a falsehood."

A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said
stonily: "Go on, please."

"It was, as you know," pursued Mr. Cupples, "a moonlight night; but I
was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could
not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just as
Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards
Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson's face as it went, because his
back was to me, but he shook his left hand at the car with extraordinary
violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him to go back to
White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he did not go. He
opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he stood there on
the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent, his arms hung at
his sides, and he looked somehow ... rigid. For a few moments he
remained in this tense attitude; then all of a sudden his right arm
moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his overcoat. I saw his
face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared and the eyes glittering,
and all at once I knew that the man was mad. Almost as quickly as that
flashed across my mind, something else flashed in the moonlight. He held
the pistol before him, pointing at his breast.

"Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson
intended to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing
nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant to
wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and robbery.

"At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what I
was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook me
off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the
chest, and presented the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists
before he could fire, and clung with all my strength--you remember how
bruised and scratched they were. I knew I was fighting for my own life
now, for murder was in his eyes. We struggled like two beasts, without
an articulate word, I holding his pistol-hand down and keeping a grip on
the other. I never dreamed that I had the strength for such an
encounter. Then, with a perfectly instinctive movement--I ne