peals of that province."

He stopped and lighted his cigarette deliberately, with a match
scratched slowly on the table.

"Monsieur," he said, "I do not criticize your elevated court. It is
composed of learned men--wise and patriotic, I have no doubt. They
cannot make the laws, monsieur; they cannot coin a conception of justice
for your people. They must enforce the precise rules of law that the
conception of justice in your country has established.

"Nevertheless, monsieur"--and his thin yellow lips curled--"for the sake
of my depleted revenues I could have wished that the decision of this
court had been other than it was."

"And what did it decide?" asked the American.

"It decided, monsieur," replied the Count, "that my estates in Salerno
must continue to be charged with the gratuity to the indigent relative.

"That is to say, monsieur, it decided, because the great pagan did not
wait to die in agony, did not wait for the mortal wounds inflicted by
the would-be assassin to kill him, that interesting person--the man in
the green hat--was not guilty of murder in the first degree and could
not be hanged!"

Note--See State versus Angelina; 80 Southeastern Reporter, 141: "The
intervening responsible agent who wrongfully accelerates death is guilty
of the murder, and not the one who inflicted the first injury, though in
itself mortal."

VI. The Wrong Sign

It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine
and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the
pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile.

We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in
St. James's Square.

He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch
of his mother's family in Virginia--a branch that had gone out with a
King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor,
Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster
daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her
father had been concerned.

Sir Henry Marquis believed that these cases in their tragic details, and
their inspirational, deductive handling, equaled any of our modern time.
The great library overlooking St. James's Square, was curtained off from
London. Sir Henry read by the fire; and I listened, returned, as by some
recession of time to the Virginia of a vanished decade. The narrative of
the diary follows:

My fa