“A man!” he gasped.  “Foot of St. Wrytha’s Stair there, doctor.  Dead—­or if not dead, near it.  I saw it!”

Bryce seized Varner’s arm and gave it a shake.

“You saw—­what?” he demanded.

“Saw him—­fall.  Or rather—­flung!” panted Varner.  “Somebody—­couldn’t see who, nohow—­flung him right through yon doorway, up there.  He fell right over the steps—­crash!” Bryce looked over the tops of the yews and cypresses at the doorway in the clerestory to which Varner pointed—­a low, open archway gained by the half-ruinous stair.  It was forty feet at least from the ground.

“You saw him—­thrown!” he exclaimed.  “Thrown—­down there?  Impossible, man!”

“Tell you I saw it!” asserted Varner doggedly.  “I was looking at one of those old tombs yonder—­somebody wants some repairs doing—­and the jackdaws were making such a to-do up there by the roof I glanced up at them.  And I saw this man thrown through that door—­fairly flung through it!  God!—­do you think I could mistake my own eyes?”

“Did you see who flung him?” asked Bryce.

“No; I saw a hand—­just for one second, as it might be—­by the edge of the doorway,” answered Varner.  “I was more for watching him!  He sort of tottered for a second on the step outside the door, turned over and screamed—­I can hear it now!—­and crashed down on the flags beneath.”

“How long since?” demanded Bryce.

“Five or six minutes,” said Varner.  “I rushed to him—­I’ve been doing what I could.  But I saw it was no good, so I was running for help—­”

Bryce pushed him towards the bushes by which they were standing.

“Take me to him,” he said.  “Come on!”

Varner turned back, making a way through the cypresses.  He led Bryce to the foot of the great wall of the nave.  There in the corner formed by the angle of nave and transept, on a broad pavement of flagstones, lay the body of a man crumpled up in a curiously twisted position.  And with one glance, even before he reached it, Bryce knew what body it was—­that of the man who had come, shyly and furtively, to Ransford’s door.

“Look!” exclaimed Varner, suddenly pointing.  “He’s stirring!”

Bryce, whose gaze was fastened on the twisted figure, saw a slight movement which relaxed as suddenly as it had occurred.  Then came stillness.  “That’s the end!” he muttered.  “The man’s dead!  I’ll guarantee that before I put a hand on him.  Dead enough!” he went on, as he reached the body and dropped on one knee by it.  “His neck’s broken.”

The mason bent down and looked, half-curiously, half-fearfully, at the dead man.  Then he glanced upward—­at the open door high above them in the walls.

“It’s a fearful drop, that, sir,” he said.  “And he came down with such violence.  You’re sure it’s over with him?”