heavily, "and I will show you the
whole cursed thing."

The attic, which was the secretary's private place (and rather a small
cell for so large a hermit), had indeed all the vestiges of a violent
drama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flung
away; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quite
empty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and a
length of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly across
the windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on the
carpet.

"I was drunk," said Royce; and this simplicity in the prematurely
battered man somehow had the pathos of the first sin of a baby.

"You all know about me," he continued huskily; "everybody knows how my
story began, and it may as well end like that too. I was called a clever
man once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remains
of a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in his
own way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn't let me marry Alice here; and it
will always be said that he was right enough. Well, you can form your
own conclusions, and you won't want me to go into details. That is my
whisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quite
emptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on the
corpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown. You need not
set detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in this
world. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough!"

At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large man
to lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered by
the remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands and
knees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind of
undignified prayers. Being a person utterly insensible to the social
figure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright round
face up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with a
very comic human head.

"I say," he said good-naturedly, "this really won't do at all, you know.
At the beginning you said we'd found no weapon. But now we're finding
too many; there's the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and the
pistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of a
window! It won't do. It's not economical." And he shook his head at the
ground as a horse does grazing.

Inspector Gilder