d him over on his back. Then I knew that
I was there with a dead man. The hue of the face was unmistakably that of
death. And the cause of it was plainly to be seen. There was a wound in
the man's neck from which blood came freely.

"How had the wound--clearly a fatal one--been caused? I searched for an
explanation. That which forced itself upon me was that the girl had in
her desperation stabbed her persecutor with some weapon she had found
there or brought with her. It was a horrible idea to entertain, although
the act would have been almost justified. I wondered if by chance the
weapon was still there. Striking a match I looked round. Yes; there on
the floor near the spot where Henshaw had first fallen, lay a narrow
blood-stained chisel.

"Whatever my first conclusions were I can see now the most probable
explanation of how Henshaw came by his death-wound. He had forced the
chisel away from the girl; he had kept it in his hand; in his eagerness
to prevent his victim's escape he had not realized that he was holding
it point upwards, and when he fell it had pierced him with all the force
of his heavy body falling plump on it."

"Then you know it was an accident?" Edith Morriston drew a great breath
of relief from the painful tension with which she had listened.

"I can see it was a pure accident," Gifford answered. "All the same it
was an accident with an ugly look about it, and I quickly realized that I
was in an equivocal--not to say dangerous, situation."

"It was a terrible predicament for you," the girl said sympathetically.

"It was indeed. And one which called for prompt action. Moreover the very
fact that I was not in evening clothes made it all the more suspicious. I
pulled my wits together and proceeded to make quite sure that the man was
actually dead. That I found was beyond all doubt the case, and it now
remained for me to make my escape before being found there in that
hideous situation.

"I went out to the landing, closing the door after me, with the idea of
getting down the stairs and escaping into the garden as secretly as I had
come in. I had crept down a very few stairs when I found this was not to
be. A chatter of voices just below told me that people were in the tower,
and leaning over I could see couples passing between the passage to the
hall and the room below me.

"At any moment, I realized, some of them might take it into their heads
to explore the topmost room, when the result would b