"I doubt you were the inspirer of most of his iniquities at that time," said Lavendale. "It was your knowledge of poisons which put him in the way of accommodating his sated love and gratifying his revenge at one stroke. It is only the dead who do not come back." That last gust of October wind did its work. Fétis rose to his feet with his nerves restored, and faced his accuser with an easy insolence. "Your lordship's wine has been too strong for my poor brain," he said lightly, "and I fear I have troubled you with one of my raving fits. My good little wife will tell you that I am subject to a kind of brain fever after anything in the way of a debauch. Your lordship should not have tempted me to so far exceed my usual two bottles. Pray, Mr. Durnford, be so good as to show me to the hall. I shall not trouble your lordship's chairmen. The walk home will steady my poor head. Your lordship's most humble and deeply obliged servant." He gave a low bow, a succession of bows rather, with which he bent and wriggled himself out of Lord Lavendale's presence, in a series of serpentine curves. Lavendale made as if he would have sprung at him, longing to clutch at that wizened throat and pin the secret murderer to the floor, to imprison him for the rest of the night, and deliver him over to the officers of justice in the morning; but Durnford laid a warning hand upon his shoulder. "Let him go," he whispered. "There is no evidence against him yet." Lavendale submitted, and Durnford led the way to the hall, and saw Mr. Fétis out of doors with supreme courtesy. Fétis flung a couple of crowns to the sleepy chairmen as he passed out. "Get to your beds, my good fellows," he said. "My legs are steady enough to carry me home, in spite of your master's Burgundy." "Why did you not help me to detain him?" asked Lavendale, when Durnford rejoined him in the wainscoted parlour. "What can justice want more than the wretch's own confession of his guilt?" "Justice--as represented by a Bow Street magistrate--would want a great deal more evidence than the incoherent ravings of a drunkard, repeated at second hand. Our moral certainty that Fétis poisoned your old Venetian's granddaughter will not hang him, any more than the suspicions of the neighbours and the apothecary forty years ago." "Yet I think your little play succeeded, and that the craven hound revealed himself clearly enough at sight of your poor pale wife, scared to death at the part she had to act, and looking every inch a ghost. Neither you nor I can ever doubt that he and Topsparkle were accomplices in a villainous murder. A pleasant reflection for one who loves Topsparkle's wife, and might have run away with her, yet chose to play the moralist and leave her in a murderer's clutches."