she fell straight backwards. Charles Juxon, who was watching her,
sprang forward and caught her in his arms. Then he bore her from the
room, swiftly, while John Short who was as white and speechless as the
rest opened the door.

"You may go in now," said Juxon as he passed Booley and Mr. Ambrose in
the passage, with his burden in his arms. A few steps farther on he met
Holmes the butler, who carried a telegram on a salver.

"For Mr. Short, sir," said the impassive servant, not appearing to notice
anything strange in the fact that his master was carrying the inanimate
body of Mary Goddard.

"He is in there--go in," said Juxon hurriedly as he went on his way.

The detective and the vicar had already entered the room where the dead
convict was lying. All stood around the bed, gazing at his pale face as
he lay.

"A telegram for Mr. Short," said Holmes from the door. John started and
took the despatch from the butler's hands. He hastily tore it open,
glanced at the contents and thrust it into his pocket. Every one looked
round.

"What is it, John?" whispered the vicar, who was nearest to him.

"Oh--nothing. I am first in the Tripos, that is all," answered John very
simply, as though it were not a matter of the least consequence.

Through all those months of untiring labour, through privation and
anxiety, through days of weariness and nights of study, he had looked
forward to the triumph, often doubting but never despairing. But he had
little guessed that the news of victory would reach him at such a moment.
It was nothing, he said; and indeed as he stood with the group of pale
and awe-struck spectators by the dead man's bed, he felt that the
greatest thing which had ever happened to him was as nothing compared
with the tragedy of which he had witnessed the last act.

It was all over. There was nothing more to be said; the convict had
escaped the law in the end, at the very moment when the hand of the law
was upon him. Thomas Reid, the conservative sexton, buried him "four by
six by two," grumbling at the parish depth as of yore, and a simple stone
cross marked his nameless grave. There it stands to this day in the
churchyard of Billingsfield, Essex, in the shadow of the ancient abbey.

All these things happened a long time ago, according to Billingsfield
reckoning, but the story of the tramp who attacked Squire Juxon and was
pulled down by the bloodhound is still told by the villagers, and Mr.
Gall, being once in