at table a will leaving me
and my new church half a million. Come, where are the handcuffs? Do you
suppose I care what foolish things you do with me? Penal servitude will
only be like waiting for her at a wayside station. The gallows will only
be going to her in a headlong car."

He spoke with the brain-shaking authority of an orator, and Flambeau
and Joan Stacey stared at him in amazed admiration. Father Brown's face
seemed to express nothing but extreme distress; he looked at the ground
with one wrinkle of pain across his forehead. The prophet of the sun
leaned easily against the mantelpiece and resumed:

"In a few words I have put before you the whole case against me--the
only possible case against me. In fewer words still I will blow it
to pieces, so that not a trace of it remains. As to whether I have
committed this crime, the truth is in one sentence: I could not have
committed this crime. Pauline Stacey fell from this floor to the
ground at five minutes past twelve. A hundred people will go into the
witness-box and say that I was standing out upon the balcony of my own
rooms above from just before the stroke of noon to a quarter-past--the
usual period of my public prayers. My clerk (a respectable youth from
Clapham, with no sort of connection with me) will swear that he sat
in my outer office all the morning, and that no communication passed
through. He will swear that I arrived a full ten minutes before the
hour, fifteen minutes before any whisper of the accident, and that I did
not leave the office or the balcony all that time. No one ever had so
complete an alibi; I could subpoena half Westminster. I think you had
better put the handcuffs away again. The case is at an end.

"But last of all, that no breath of this idiotic suspicion remain in the
air, I will tell you all you want to know. I believe I do know how my
unhappy friend came by her death. You can, if you choose, blame me for
it, or my faith and philosophy at least; but you certainly cannot
lock me up. It is well known to all students of the higher truths that
certain adepts and illuminati have in history attained the power of
levitation--that is, of being self-sustained upon the empty air. It is
but a part of that general conquest of matter which is the main element
in our occult wisdom. Poor Pauline was of an impulsive and ambitious
temper. I think, to tell the truth, she thought herself somewhat deeper
in the mysteries than she was; and she has of