or some reason Flambeau started and looked
up, as if they had stung him. And the same instant the doctor down by
the end of the conservatory began running towards them, calling out
something as he ran.

As he came among them like a bombshell the restless Atkinson happened to
be taking a turn nearer to the house front; and the doctor clutched him
by the collar in a convulsive grip. "Foul play!" he cried; "what have
you been doing to him, you dog?"

The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a soldier in
command.

"No fighting," he cried coolly; "we are enough to hold anyone we want
to. What is the matter, doctor?"

"Things are not right with Quinton," said the doctor, quite white. "I
could just see him through the glass, and I don't like the way he's
lying. It's not as I left him, anyhow."

"Let us go in to him," said Father Brown shortly. "You can leave Mr.
Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quinton's voice."

"I will stop here and watch him," said Flambeau hurriedly. "You go in
and see."

The doctor and the priest flew to the study door, unlocked it, and fell
into the room. In doing so they nearly fell over the large mahogany
table in the centre at which the poet usually wrote; for the place was
lit only by a small fire kept for the invalid. In the middle of this
table lay a single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The
doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and
crying, "Good God, look at that!" plunged toward the glass room beyond,
where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory
of the sunset.

Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the paper.
The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" They were
in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, handwriting of Leonard
Quinton.

Then Father Brown, still keeping the paper in his hand, strode towards
the conservatory, only to meet his medical friend coming back with a
face of assurance and collapse. "He's done it," said Harris.

They went together through the gorgeous unnatural beauty of cactus
and azalea and found Leonard Quinton, poet and romancer, with his head
hanging downward off his ottoman and his red curls sweeping the ground.
Into his left side was thrust the queer dagger that they had picked up
in the garden, and his limp hand still rested on the hilt.

Outside the storm had come at one stride, like the night in Cole