le him with the rope, which he threw over his
head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Then
it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.
I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed to
cut the rope before I fainted."

"I see," said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility. "Thank you."

As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly
into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick
Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspector
submissively:

"Might I say a word to the prisoner in your presence; and might he take
off those funny cuffs for a minute?"

"He is a very powerful man," said Merton in an undertone. "Why do you
want them taken off?"

"Why, I thought," replied the priest humbly, "that perhaps I might have
the very great honour of shaking hands with him."

Both detectives stared, and Father Brown added: "Won't you tell them
about it, sir?"

The man on the chair shook his tousled head, and the priest turned
impatiently.

"Then I will," he said. "Private lives are more important than public
reputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their
dead."

He went to the fatal window, and blinked out of it as he went on
talking.

"I told you that in this case there were too many weapons and only one
death. I tell you now that they were not weapons, and were not used to
cause death. All those grisly tools, the noose, the bloody knife, the
exploding pistol, were instruments of a curious mercy. They were not
used to kill Sir Aaron, but to save him."

"To save him!" repeated Gilder. "And from what?"

"From himself," said Father Brown. "He was a suicidal maniac."

"What?" cried Merton in an incredulous tone. "And the Religion of
Cheerfulness--"

"It is a cruel religion," said the priest, looking out of the window.
"Why couldn't they let him weep a little, like his fathers before him?
His plans stiffened, his views grew cold; behind that merry mask was
the empty mind of the atheist. At last, to keep up his hilarious public
level, he fell back on that dram-drinking he had abandoned long ago. But
there is this horror about alcoholism in a sincere teetotaler: that he
pictures and expects that psychological inferno from which he has warned
others. It leapt upon poor Armstrong prematurely, and by this morning
he was in such a case that he sat here and c