Again he had to consider his course of action, and he was not long undecided. He would be silent. It was not Reginald he was championing, it was Florence. Until he saw and spoke with her he would do all that lay in his power to divert suspicion from the man she loved. Animated by this resolve, and with a dogged disregard of consequences, he folded the incriminating document and put it in his pocket. He made no attempt to justify himself; at all hazards he was determined to protect Florence, and, right or wrong, he would do what he had determined to do. The knowledge he had gained he would keep locked in his breast. Let others make the discovery of the murder. He would not move a step towards it. All this time he had not given a thought to his own safety, to the peril in which he would be placed if his presence in the house of death became known. It was easy enough to devise a train of argument which would cast such suspicion upon himself as to cause most people to believe that he was the guilty man. Having no wish to court this danger he determined to leave the house as quickly as possible, and to postpone further reflection till the morning. A last look into the death-chamber, a swift glance at the awful form lying there, a hurried examination of the papers to see if there were any other incriminating documents among them--which to his relief there were not--a pause before the wax figure of the Chinaman and a weird fancy that it also had met its death at the hand of a murderer, the careful gathering together of all the articles he had brought with him into the house, and he was ready to go. He had a thought of leaving the house by the front door, but there was greater risk in that than in going back the way he had come; so he scrambled out of the window at the back, finding it much more difficult to scramble out than to scramble in, and was once more in the yard. He listened for sounds of voices or footsteps in the thoroughfare on the other side of the dead wall, and, hearing none, flung his grapnel up. It caught at the first throw, and climbing the rope he cautiously peeped over the wall to see if any wayfarers were about. No person was in sight. Detaching the grapnel he hung by his hands and dropped to the ground, thinking how foolish he had been in the first instance not to have adopted this means of reaching the inner ground. Tying the rope round his waist, and buttoning his coat over that and the large bottle, half the water in which he had drank during his investigations, he proceeded in the direction of his lodgings, nibbling a biscuit as he walked along.