Inspector Gilder had opened his mouth with serious intentions, but before he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone on quite volubly.

“And now three quite impossible things.  First, these holes in the carpet, where the six bullets have gone in.  Why on earth should anybody fire at the carpet?  A drunken man lets fly at his enemy’s head, the thing that’s grinning at him.  He doesn’t pick a quarrel with his feet, or lay siege to his slippers.  And then there’s the rope”—­and having done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees—­“in what conceivable intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man’s neck and finally put it round his leg?  Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that, or he would be sleeping like a log by now.  And, plainest of all, the whisky bottle.  You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle, and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half and leaving the other.  That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do.”

He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accused murderer in tones of limpid penitence:  “I’m awfully sorry, my dear sir, but your tale is really rubbish.”

“Sir,” said Alice Armstrong in a low tone to the priest, “can I speak to you alone for a moment?”

This request forced the communicative cleric out of the gangway, and before he could speak in the next room, the girl was talking with strange incisiveness.

“You are a clever man,” she said, “and you are trying to save Patrick, I know.  But it’s no use.  The core of all this is black, and the more things you find out the more there will be against the miserable man I love.”

“Why?” asked Brown, looking at her steadily.

“Because,” she answered equally steadily, “I saw him commit the crime myself.”

“Ah!” said the unmoved Brown, “and what did he do?”

“I was in this room next to them,” she explained; “both doors were closed, but I suddenly heard a voice, such as I had never heard on earth, roaring `Hell, hell, hell,’ again and again, and then the two doors shook with the first explosion of the revolver.  Thrice again the thing banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full of smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick’s hand; and I saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes.  Then he leapt on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and, grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over his head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet.  Then it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.  I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed to cut the rope before I fainted.”

“I see,” said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility.  “Thank you.”

As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed.  There he said to the Inspector submissively: