lled two women. I had
known that when I returned from America six months before. You can
imagine the difficulties in front of me then. I was to prove that an
English Privy Councillor, a well-known and highly respected man, was in
reality a madman who was responsible for two of the most dreadful crimes
that had ever been committed. I had never seen him, but fortunately he
was in Paris at that time, and I had no difficulty in making his
acquaintance. By extreme good fortune, I was able to render him a
service in the streets which placed him under an obligation to me. I
observed him carefully, only to find him to all appearances the sanest
and most level-headed man I had ever met. But there was one thing--he
shut himself away completely from the society of women, and he avoided
all places where beauty was to be found in any form. But I was so far
from any proof. My next step was to test my own belief that his madness
was an inherent disease, and to do that I employed inquiry agents in
this country to discover whether there were any records of such a case
in existence. It is only two weeks since I received information from
them that a woman named Mary Winslowe had died in an asylum from that
very kind of madness, forty years ago."

"That is true," corroborated the doctor.

"I came to London immediately. While following up my clues, I renewed my
acquaintance with Tranter, and pressed him to act as my cicerone in
London society, hoping to be able to entrap him into a situation that
would lead him to betray himself. And he took me to Richmond. What
happened there, you know. Though he knew when Christine Manderson first
came into the room what the outcome would be, he was unable to tear
himself away. And in the garden she forced herself upon him. He tried to
resist her, but his madness overcame him. That is the explanation of
the absence of a cry for help, which once I stated to be the key to the
mystery. If she had been walking along that path to the house, she would
have had time to cry out, no matter how quickly the assailant had sprung
out at her. But she did not utter a cry because she was already in the
arms of the assailant, compelling him to a passionate embrace, and
without doubt it was a simple thing to strangle her silently in that
very position."

"Good God!" Copplestone shuddered.

"His account of how she had asked him to find Mr. Copplestone, and tell
him she was not well, and of how he had left her on her way