She spoke with sedulous calmness; but there was a jar in her voice which did not sound quite natural. Maurice simply repeated his question, and Francis Trent shook his head. "She is the wife of Caspar Brooke, the man who, you _say_, killed your brother Oliver." The sick man's eyes dilated, and fixed themselves uneasily on his wife. "I did not say it," he answered, almost in a whisper. "Mary said it--not I." "But you heard something, did you not?" said Maurice remorselessly. "How should he hear anything," said Mary Trent, "and he asleep in his bed at the time? Or if not asleep, too ill and weak to notice anything. It's a shame to question him like that; and not legal, neither. You'll please to leave us to ourselves, sir; we ain't a show. We can but say what we saw and heard, whatever the consequences may be, but we need not be tortured for all that." "That's enough, Mary," said the man speaking from the bed in a much more natural manner and in a stronger voice than he had yet used. "You're overdoing it--you always do. It's no good. This is the last stroke, and I give up. It has gone against the grain with me to get anybody into trouble," he said, looking attentively at Lady Alice, "and now that I know who this lady is, I don't feel inclined to keep up the farce any longer. I am much too ill to live to be hanged--Mr. Kenyon can tell you so at any minute--and I may as well give you the satisfaction of knowing that Caspar Brooke had nothing at all to do with Oliver's death: I was his murderer, and no one else: I swear it, so help me God!" Lady Alice turned very faint. Someone put her in a chair and fanned her, and when she came to herself she heard Francis Trent's wife speaking. "He's mad, I tell you. It's no good paying any attention to what he says, gentlemen. I saw him myself in his bed at the time, and----" "Now, Mary, my dear good soul," said Francis with the old easy superiority which he had always assumed to her, "will you just hold your tongue, and let me tell my own tale? You have done your best for me, but you know I always told you I was not to be trusted to lie about it if anybody appealed to me to evidence. I really have not the strength to keep it up. I want at least to die like a gentleman." "I am not at all sure that you are going to die," said Maurice quietly, with his finger on the sick man's pulse. Francis had put off the vacant expression, and his eyes had lighted up. He was evidently quite himself again. "No?" he said easily. "Well, I would rather die, if it's all the same to you; because I fancy I shall have to be put under restraint if I do live. I don't always know what I am doing in the least. I know now, though. You can bear me out, doctor, isn't my brain in a very queer state?" "I fear it is," said Maurice.