"No, and that's one of the reasons why I think it might be all right yet. But the chief reason's this. She's got it into her head that it all started with that crash. Superstition, but there was no arguing with her. Well, suppose I'm right in what I told you, and Smith didn't really shoot that chap at all--didn't shoot him in the way we thought at first, I mean. It would be just like Dawdy to say that took the bad luck all off. She's always either up or down, poor darling. A rotten life she's had." I nodded, remembering Mollie's words: "She _would_ be just the woman to take a hint of that kind." Although Monty didn't know it, Audrey _had_ lost her ring, _would_ regard the loss as an omen, and the loss had probably taken place shortly before Monty had met her at the stage-door. It _did_ seem to follow, even as Monty said, that with the removal of the whole Case out of the regions of ordinary crime, there might be an end also of the nightmare shadows that had oppressed Audrey Cunningham's soul. IV This record has already taken so many turns and windings, anticipations and doublings back upon itself, that I cannot see that one more excursion will either make or mar it. Many pages ago I wrote that the Case _was_ a Case, complete, self-contained, and independent of the larger issues and forces in which it is nevertheless paradoxically rooted and involved. And though the Case as an entity is approaching its close, the outside influences continue. The _Scepter_ decision, for example, is being appealed against, and Mackwith tells me that there is every likelihood that it will end up in the Lords. The Press, from which I shall shortly retire, seems to be attaining something like a real policy with regard to the matters of which I have spoken, and, encouraged by certain signs of Ministerial yielding, has taken still better heart. Cairo to the Cape has for the present failed, and Charles Valentine Smith did not succeed in becoming a member of that gallant Expedition; but other great projects are in meditation, and this very day the announcement is made of an impending flight round the world itself, for which Cooks and Ansons and Drakes and Dampiers of little more than half my age will eagerly flock to enter. The gloomy forebodings of Hills, my fellow-clubman, that attack and defense will presently become a matter of black typhus cultures do not at present seem likely to be fulfilled, not altogether for the reasons publicly given, but for quite other ones; but the chances are that he is right about gas, and that one day we may have to carry fans and box-respirators as we now carry umbrellas. What must come must come, even as it came to our fathers before us, and we, like they, can only do the duty of our day. The rest is out of our hands, and it is impotence and vanity even to dream too far ahead. So to our immediate business, of which my own present portion is the final putting to bed of our Case.