that Cunningham's was among them, but a strange, cold
pall of darkness enveloped me, and I knew no more.

* * * * *

Afterwards I learned how it was that Cunningham, with two detectives
from Scotland Yard, had arrived in the very "nick of time."

His statements to the police authorities had been necessarily so
elaborate, and had been deemed so extraordinary, that it had taken some
time to create the desired impression at headquarters.

He had been still at "The Yard" when my wire had arrived. When at last
he had induced the "powers that be" to grant a warrant for Wildred's
arrest on suspicion of having murdered Harvey Farnham, and to send a
couple of men to the House by the Lock, where my telegram had announced
that he was probably to be found, it was too late to catch anything save
the ten o'clock train.

Having reached the door of the grim old mansion, Karine's cries for
help, ringing out upon the night through the broken skylight, had told
them in which direction to proceed, and they had used the same method of
surmounting the obstacles which I had adopted and left for them.

The servant was secured, but Wildred, seeing with his usual quickness
that all hope of escape was over, had shot himself through the heart
before the officers could reach him. So died a man who had accomplished
the death of many another, and through his humble accomplice (who now
breaks stones at Portland), and the wretched wife found prisoned in a
room upstairs, the secrets of his numerous crimes and the dark House by
the Lock were revealed.

It was not for many a day after that night's terrible experience that I
heard all the truth. What with the two wounds I had received, and the
strain of the past few weeks, which had begun to tell upon me at last,
for a time I lay in rather a precarious condition. But one morning I
woke to consciousness, and found that the beautiful face which had been
near me in my dreams was present in reality. Karine and her brother had
nursed me through more than a fortnight's illness.

Had I been quite myself I would have felt that then was not the time to
speak of love to the girl who had endured so much. But the words were
uttered before my judgment would let me restrain them, as it so often
had done in the first sweet, sad days of our acquaintance.

"Forgive me," I said weakly. "I'm a brute. You've been such an angel to
me--and I oughtn't to have told you now."