e disastrous.
Certainly in my mufti I could not get past the next floor just then
without exciting fatal notice, and to wait for an opportunity when the
coast might be clear was too dangerous, seeing the risk of someone
coming up.

"It was not easy to see my way of escape. I went to the top room and
locked the door. My nerves were pretty strong, but they were severely
tried when I shut myself in with the dead man and had the consciousness
of having laid myself open to the charge of being his murderer. I stood
there by the door thinking desperately what I could do. Fool that I had
been to venture into the place in that garb. But who could have foreseen
the result? Anyhow there was no time for reflection; it was necessary to
act and seek a possible expedient. Hopelessly enough I went into the
little inner room and struck a match. In a moment a thrill of hope came
to me, for the first object the light showed me was a big coil of rope
conspicuous among the odds and ends of lumber in the recess. The idea of
escape by the window had only occurred to me to be dismissed as a sheer
impossibility; the height of the tower made that quite prohibitive, but
here seemed a chance of it. If only the rope was long enough.

"I got hold of the coil as my match burned out, and pulled it away from
the surrounding rubbish. Its weight gave me hope that it would be
sufficient. In haste I dragged it to the outer room into which the
moonlight was now streaming. With a shuddering glance at the dead man,
whose ashen face stared up in ghastly fashion in the moonbeams, I opened
the window and looked out to make sure that no one was below. Satisfied
on that point I brought forward the rope and began paying it out of the
window. To my content I saw that there was a strong iron stanchion at the
side which would allow of the rope being fastened to it.

"There was light enough just then to enable me to see pretty well when
the end of the rope reached the ground, and upon examining what was left
in the room I calculated that not much more than half was outside. In a
flash the discovery gave me an idea. Why should I not simply pass the
rope behind the stanchion and use it doubled? By that means I could pull
it down after me when I reached the ground, and so not only effect my
escape but also leave the fact unknown. That, together with the door
locked on the inside, would tend to make Henshaw's death a mystery with a
strong probability in favour of suicide