“I think the worst was waiting for her to come down.  I opened both doors, but she never came.  Then I shut them very quietly—­and utterly lost my head.  You know what I did.  I don’t remember doing half.  It was the stupid cunning of a real madman, the broken window, and the things up the chimney.  I got back as I had come, in the way that struck you as possible when you were there, and I woke my landlady getting in.  I believe I told her everything on the spot, and that it was the last sense I spoke for weeks; she nursed me day and night that I might never tell anybody else.”

So the story ended, and with it, as might have been expected, the unnatural strength which had sustained the teller till the last; he had used up every ounce of it, and he lay exhausted and collapsed.  Langholm became uneasy.

Severino could not swallow the champagne which Langholm poured into his mouth.

Langholm fetched the candle in high alarm—­higher yet at what it revealed.

Severino was struggling to raise himself, a deadly leaden light upon his face.

“Raise me up—­raise me up.”

Langholm raised him in his arms.

“Another—­hemorrhage!” said Severino, in a gasping whisper.

And his blood dripped with the words.

Langholm propped him up and rushed out shouting for Brunton—­for Mrs. Brunton—­for anybody in the house.  Both were in, and the woman came up bravely without a word.

“I’ll go for the doctor myself,” said Langholm.  “I shall be quickest.”

And he went on his bicycle, hatless, with an unlit lamp.

But the doctor came too late.

CHAPTER XXVIII

IN THE MATTER OF A MOTIVE

That was between eight and nine o’clock at night; before ten an outrageous thought occurred to the man with the undisciplined imagination.  It closed his mind to the tragedy of an hour ago, to the dead man lying upstairs, whose low and eager voice still went on and on in his ears.  It was a thought that possessed Langholm like an unclean spirit from the moment in which he raised his eyes from the last words of the manuscript to which the dead man had referred.

In the long, low room that Langholm lived in a fire was necessary in damp weather, irrespective of the season.  It was on the fire that his eyes fell, straight from the paper in his hand ...

No one else had read it.  There was an explicit assurance on the point.  The Chelsea landlady had no idea that such a statement was in existence; she would certainly have destroyed it if she had known; and further written details convinced Langholm that the woman would never speak of her own accord.  There were strange sidelights on the feelings which the young Italian had inspired in an unlikely breast; a mother could have done no more to shield him.  On the night of the acquittal, for example, when he was slowly recovering in her house, it had since come