spell. Instinctively everyone turned
to him. The significance of the bluish-coloured characters was
slowly dawning upon the inspector; but the others still seemed
puzzled to account for their presence.

Immediately he had lifted the plate from the letter, Malcolm Sage
had drawn a sheet of plain sermon paper from the rack before him.
This he subjected to the same treatment as the letter. When a few
seconds later he exposed it, there in the centre appeared the same
words:----

Malcolm Sage,
August 12th, 1919.

but on this sheet the number was 203.

Then the true significance of the two sheets of paper seemed to dawn
upon the onlookers.

Suddenly there was a scream, and Muriel Crayne fell forward on to
the floor.

"Oh! father, father, forgive me!" she cried, and the next moment she
was beating the floor with her hands in violent hysterics.

III

"From the first I suspected the truth," remarked Malcolm Sage, as he,
Robert Freynes and Inspector Murdy sat smoking in the car that Tims
was taking back to London at its best pace. "Eighty-five years ago a
somewhat similar case occurred in France, that of Marie de Morel,
when an innocent man was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, and
actually served eight before the truth was discovered."

The inspector whistled under his breath.

"This suspicion was strengthened by the lengthy account of the
affair written by Miss Crayne, which Murdy obtained from her. The
punctuation, the phrasing, the inaccurate use of auxiliary verbs,
were identical with that of the anonymous letters.

"Another point was that the similarity of the handwriting of the
anonymous letters to Blade's became more pronounced as the letters
themselves multiplied. The writer was becoming more expert as an
imitator."

Freynes nodded his head several times.

"The difficulty, however, was to prove it," continued Malcolm Sage.
"There was only one way; to substitute secretly marked paper for
that in use at the vicarage.

"I accordingly went down to Gylston, and the vicar found me keenly
interested in monumental brasses, his pet subject, and Norman
architecture. He invited me to the vicarage. In his absence from his
study I substituted a supply of marked Olympic Script in place of
that in his letter-rack, and also in the drawer of his writing-table.
As a further precaution, I arranged for my fountain-pen to run out
of ink. He kindly supplied me with a bottle, obviously belonging to
hi