The judge nodded.  “Your statement against this man Borkins—?”

“Is as strong a one as ever was made,” said Cleek.  “It was Borkins who—­in a fit of malicious rage, no doubt—­conceived the idea of interfering with his master’s work to the extent of inventing the means to have Sir Nigel Merriton wrongly convicted of the murder of Dacre Wynne.  You have seen the revolver, the peculiar make of which caused it to be the chief evidence in this gruesome tragedy.  Here is the genuine one.”

He drew the little thing from his pocket, and reaching up placed it in the judge’s outstretched hand.  That gentleman gave a gasp as he laid eyes upon it.

“Identical with this one, which belongs to the prisoner!” he said—­almost excitedly.

“Exactly.  The same colonial French make, you see.  This particular one belongs, by the way, to Miss Brellier.”

“Miss Brellier!”

Something like a thrill ran through the crowded courtroom.  In the silence that followed you could have heard a pin drop.

“That is correct.  She will tell you that she always kept it in an unused drawer in her secretaire locked away with some papers.  She had not looked at it for months, until the other day when she happened to examine one of those papers, and therefore went to the drawer and unlocked it.  The revolver lying there drew her attention.  Knowing that it was the same as the one owned by her fiance, Sir Nigel Merriton, and figuring so largely in this case, she took it out and idly examined it.  One of the bullets was missing!  This rather aroused her curiosity, and when I questioned her afterward about it, when the inquest was over, and she had brought it forward and shown it to the coroner, who—­quite naturally—­after the explanation given by Mr. Brellier, gave it back to her as having no dealings with the case, she told me that she could not absolutely recollect her uncle telling her that he had killed the dog with it.  A small thing but rather important.”

“And you say that this man Borkins arranged this revolver so as to point to the prisoner’s guilt, Mr. Cleek?” asked the judge.

“I say that the man Dacre Wynne was actually killed with that identical revolver which you hold in your hand, my lord.  And the construction I put upon it is this:  Borkins hated his master, but the long story of that does not concern us here, and upon the night of the quarrel he was listening at the door, and, hearing how things were shaping themselves, began, as he himself has told you in his evidence, to think that there would soon be trouble between Sir Nigel and Mr. Wynne, if things went on as they had been going.  Therefore, when he was told that Mr. Wynne had gone out across the Fens in a drunken rage, to investigate the meaning of the Frozen Flames, the idea entered Borkins’s mind.  He knew his master’s revolver, had seen it slipped under his pillow more often than not of an evening when