as to leave only one sublimely simple solution.  The very terms of the problem were so inconceivable that, had I not been the murderer, I should have suspected myself, in conjunction, of course, with Mrs. Drabdump.  The first persons to enter the room would have seemed to me guilty.  I wrote at once (in a disguised hand and over the signature of ’One who looks through his own spectacles’) to the Pell Mell Press to suggest this.  By associating myself thus with Mrs. Drabdump I made it difficult for people to dissociate the two who entered the room together.  To dash a half-truth in the world’s eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether.  This pseudonymous letter of mine I contradicted (in my own name) the next day, and in the course of the long letter which I was tempted to write, I adduced fresh evidence against the theory of suicide.  I was disgusted with the open verdict, and wanted men to be up 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 over-shadow 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.

“A Reprieve!  Hooray!  Hooray!” The whole street seemed to rock with earthquake and the names of Grodman and Mortlake to be thrown up in a fiery jet.  “A Reprieve!  A Reprieve!” And then the very windows rattled with cheers for the Minister.  And even above that roar rose the shrill voices of the newsboys, “Reprieve of Mortlake!  Mortlake Reprieved!” Grodman looked wonderingly towards the street.  “How do they know?” he murmured.

“Those evening papers are amazing,” said the Minister, drily.  “But I suppose they had everything ready in type for the contingency.”  He turned to his secretary.