had opened his mouth with serious intentions, but
before he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone on
quite volubly.

"And now three quite impossible things. First, these holes in the
carpet, where the six bullets have gone in. Why on earth should anybody
fire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy's head, the
thing that's grinning at him. He doesn't pick a quarrel with his feet,
or lay siege to his slippers. And then there's the rope"--and having
done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his
pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees--"in what conceivable
intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man's neck and
finally put it round his leg? Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that,
or he would be sleeping like a log by now. And, plainest of all, the
whisky bottle. You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle,
and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half and
leaving the other. That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do."

He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accused
murderer in tones of limpid penitence: "I'm awfully sorry, my dear sir,
but your tale is really rubbish."

"Sir," said Alice Armstrong in a low tone to the priest, "can I speak to
you alone for a moment?"

This request forced the communicative cleric out of the gangway, and
before he could speak in the next room, the girl was talking with
strange incisiveness.

"You are a clever man," she said, "and you are trying to save Patrick,
I know. But it's no use. The core of all this is black, and the more
things you find out the more there will be against the miserable man I
love."

"Why?" asked Brown, looking at her steadily.

"Because," she answered equally steadily, "I saw him commit the crime
myself."

"Ah!" said the unmoved Brown, "and what did he do?"

"I was in this room next to them," she explained; "both doors were
closed, but I suddenly heard a voice, such as I had never heard on
earth, roaring 'Hell, hell, hell,' again and again, and then the two
doors shook with the first explosion of the revolver. Thrice again the
thing banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full of
smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick's hand; and I
saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes. Then he leapt
on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and,
grappling, tried to strang