and doing and trying to find me out. I enjoyed
the hunt more. Unfortunately, Wimp, set on the chase again by my own
letter, by dint of persistent blundering, blundered into a track
which--by a devilish tissue of coincidences I had neither foreseen nor
dreamt of--seemed to the world the true. Mortlake was arrested and
condemned. Wimp had apparently crowned his reputation. This was too
much. I had taken all this trouble merely to put a feather in Wimp's
cap, whereas I had expected to shake his reputation by it. It was bad
enough that an innocent man should suffer; but that Wimp should achieve
a reputation he did not deserve, and overshadow all his predecessors by
dint of a colossal mistake, this seemed to me intolerable. I have moved
heaven and earth to get the verdict set aside and to save the prisoner;
I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world
searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain.
I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could
not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible
mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by
his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure to-night, before it
is too late to save Mortlake."

"So that is the reason?" said the Home Secretary with a suspicion of
mockery in his tones.

"The sole reason."

Even as he spoke a deeper roar than ever penetrated the study. The crowd
had again started cheering. Impatient as the watchers were, they felt
that no news was good news. The longer the interview accorded by the
Home Secretary to the chairman of the Defense Committee, the greater the
hope his obduracy was melting. The idol of the people would be saved,
and "Grodman" and "Tom Mortlake" were mingled in the exultant plaudits.

"Templeton," said the Minister, "have you got down every word of Mr.
Grodman's confession?"

"Every word, sir."

"Then bring in the cable you received just as Mr. Grodman entered the
house."

Templeton went back into the outer room and brought back the cablegram
that had been lying on the Minister's writing-table when Grodman came
in. The Home Secretary silently handed it to his visitor. It was from
the Chief of Police of Melbourne, announcing that Jessie Dymond had just
arrived in that city in a sailing vessel, ignorant of all that had
occurred, and had been immediately dispatched back to England, having
made a statement entirely corrob