d himself truly, a Beauty-Killer. That strange lust he
inherited from his mother, who had been robbed of all she cared for, and
hoped for, in life by a beautiful woman, and rendered insane three
months before his birth. It was a most pathetic tragedy. We shall now
hear----"

"One moment," Inspector Fay interrupted. "As I represent the police
here, I should be glad to know, before we go any further, whose house I
am in."

"Pardon me," Monsieur Dupont apologized. "I had forgotten. You are in
the house of Doctor Lessing," he inclined himself towards the doctor,
"who will in due course repeat to you a statement which he made to me
yesterday. This lady is Miss Masters, who was Tranter's nurse. Mrs.
Astley-Rolfe and Mr. Copplestone--which, I fancy, is not his correct
name--you know already."

He added a high compliment to the inspector's present position and past
achievements, and then turned to Copplestone.

"Mr. Copplestone, when Tranter did not return to me at the appointed
time this afternoon, I went to your house. I found great changes. I
found it, as you say, upside down."

Copplestone was radiant with happiness. Every trace of the old gloom had
left him. He was a new man.

"I should think you did!" he retorted. "And you'd have found the earth
upside down as well, if I'd been able to turn it."

"I was puzzled," Monsieur Dupont admitted. "I could not understand it.
But I knew this--that when the shadows roll away from a man's house,
they roll away from his life. When he draws the blinds and throws open
the windows of his house to the light and the air, he draws the blinds
and throws open the windows of his soul. When he straightens his garden,
he straightens himself. I knew that before you would lift the cloud from
your house something must have lifted the cloud from you. You had been
delivered----"

"There was a fellow in the Bible," said Copplestone--"I think he was a
king--who was cured of leprosy by taking a dip in a river. I don't know
what happened afterwards, but I am quite sure that he turned his palace
upside down when he got back."

He sprang up, his face illuminated with all the wonder of his new birth.

"I am free!" he cried. "Free! That's what my house told you. I had been
brought out into the light after half a life of darkness. I had been
released after forty years of prison, of torment that all the tortures
of the Inquisition at once couldn't have equalled!"

He stared about him, like an int