So he pulled up, knocked at the door--and you know the rest. He swore to the very last that he did not do it, that he was merely the agent of the knife--that diabolical knife with the secret history. Murphy came to the door. His pretty, dissolute face was rather flushed with annoyance. His lips, those pouting, cherry-red lips like a girl’s, showed his white, even teeth under his mustache, which was turning white. His sodden brown eyes, half veiled in a web of crow’s feet, his smirking, unfailing air of conceit and satisfaction, struck clean-living, over-wrought Stapley as disgusting. The man was an evil clod upon an honest earth. There was the trail of twenty years’ intrigue, shuffling, and sham on his features. His eyes were dull with the ruin of many women. He was accursed, heavy, hateful with old secrets, old sins--like the knife. The knife! It claimed kinship. It flew forward to his heart. That is all. As Murphy shouted out and fell, Stapley went, quick and silent like a panther, up the stairs--quick and silent, with the cunning of a wild animal, just as Barbara, a few weeks later, stole up after him. He softly shut his oak--the oak is always discreet--and sat shivering, almost breathless, in the dark, listening to the tramp of feet and the anxious buzz of tongues underneath. When everything was still he stole out and went to Dulwich. Augusta had a blue gown--it was the Boat Race day--and Stapley was a Cambridge man. She wore blue constantly afterward. This was one of his plaintive injuries when he babbled out everything at the trial. Blue at the theater that night when his face betrayed him to the vigilant eye of Barbara. Blue when she came to the court to give evidence against him. I wonder if she wears blue when she goes to see him at Broadmoor. Some women would do that in the hope of a cure; though, as you say, they probably don’t allow visits at Broadmoor, and a cure wouldn’t be of any real help in Stapley’s case. HOPKINS. ORCHARD was artistic--and talked about it. How tiresome such people are! He split the world into two factions--the artist and the rank, impossible Philistine. Religious bigots talk in the same way--of professing Christians and the unregenerate. I knew a dear old lady once who thought that we had a perfect right to stone some Mohammedan missionaries who came to England. In the middle of a country walk Orchard would stop, with a deep gulp of admiration, and ask you to admire the view. He raved of autumn tints, apple blossoms, bare boughs. He pretended to like a fog. He painted landscapes--or seascapes, according to your imagination--on the panels of his walls; he stenciled his ceilings, and produced an idealized portrait of his laundress.