Cleek held up a silencing hand.

“No,” he said, firmly.  “Not just yet, I think.  They may be needed for evidence when the constable comes.  Now....”  He crossed over to where the bodies lay, and gently removed the covering.  Merriton went suddenly white, while the doctor, more used to such sights, bit his lips and laid a steadying hand upon the younger man’s arm.

“My God!” cried Sir Nigel, despairingly.  “How did they meet their death?”

Cleek reached down a finger and gently touched a blackened spot upon Wynne’s temple.

“Shot through the head, and the bullet penetrated the brain,” he said, quietly.  “Small-calibre revolver, too.  There’s your Frozen Flame for you, my friend!”

But he was hardly prepared for the event that followed.  For at this statement, Merriton threw a hand out suddenly, as though warding off a blow, took a step forward and peered at that which had once been his friend—­and enemy—­and then gave out a strangled cry.

“Shot through the head!” he fairly shrieked, as Borkins came quietly into the room, and stopped short at the sound of his master’s voice.  “I tell you it’s impossible—­impossible!  It wasn’t my shot, Mr. Headland—­it couldn’t have been!”

CHAPTER XV

A STARTLING DISCLOSURE

Cleek took a sudden step forward.

“What’s that?  What’s that?” he rapped out, sharply. “Your shot, Sir Nigel?  This is something I haven’t heard of before, and it’s likely to cause trouble.  Explain, please!”

But Merriton was past explaining anything just then.  For he had bowed his head in his hands and was sobbing in great, heart-wrung sobs with Doctor Bartholomew’s arms about him, sobs that told of the nerve-strain which gave them birth, that told of the tenseness under which he had lived these last weeks.  And now the thread had snapped, and all the broken, jangling nerves of the man had been loosed and torn his control to atoms.

The doctor shook him gently, but with firm fingers.

“Don’t be a fool, boy—­don’t be a fool!” he said over and over again, as he waved the other away, and, taking out a little phial from his waistcoat pocket, dropped a dose from it into a wine-glass and forced it between the man’s lips.  “Don’t make an ass of yourself, Nigel.  The shot you fired was nothing—­the mere whim of a man, whose brain had been fired by champagne and who wasn’t therefore altogether responsible for his actions.”

He whipped round suddenly upon Cleek, his faded eyes, with their fringe of almost white lashes, flashing like points of light from the seamed and wrinkled frame of his face.

“If you want to hear that foolish part of the story, I can give it to you,” he said, sharply.  “Because I happened to be there.”

“You!”