s
column. A name, a familiar name, caught my eye; the name of one who, I
had fondly fancied, had: long-lain unburied in my cellar at the 'pike.
My princely _havanna_ fell unheeded on the marble pavement of the
_patio_, as with indescribable amazement I read the following 'par.'

'William Evans, the man accused of the murder of Sir Runan Errand, will
be tried at the Newnham Assizes on the 20th. The case, which excites
considerable interest among the _elite_ of Boding and district, will
come on the _tapis_ the first day of the meeting. The evidence will be
of a purely circumstantial kind.'

Every word of that 'par' was a staggerer. I sat as one stunned, dazed,
stupid, motionless, with my eye on the sheet.

Was ever man in such a situation before?

Your wife commits a murder.

You become an accessory after the fact.

You take steps to destroy one of the two people who suspect the truth.

And then you find that the man on whom you committed murder is accused
of the murder which you and your wife committed.

The sound of my mother's voice scolding Philippa wakened me from my
stupor. They were coming.

I could not face them.

Doubling up the newspaper, I thrust it into my pocket, and sped swiftly
out of the _patio_.

Where did I go? I scarcely remember. I think it must have been to one of
the public gardens or public-houses, I am not certain which. All sense
of locality left me. I found at last some lonely spot, and there I threw
myself on the ground, dug my finger-nails into the dry ground, and held
on with all the tenacity of despair. In the wild whirl of my brain I
feared that I might be thrown off into infinite space. This sensation
passed off. At first I thought I had gone mad. Then I felt pretty
certain that it must be the other people who had gone mad.

I had killed William Evans.

My wife had killed Runan Errand.

How, then, could Runan Errand have been killed by William Evans?

'Which is absurd,' I found myself saying, in the language of Eukleides,
the grand old Greek.

Human justice! What is justice? See how it can err! Was there ever such
a boundless, unlimited blunder in the whole annals of penny fiction?
Probably not. I remember nothing like it in all the learned pages of
the _London Journal_ and the _Family Herald_. Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss
Braddon never dreamed of aught like this. Philippa _must_ be told. It
was too good a joke. Would she laugh? Would she be alarmed?

Picture me lying on t