"_You wrote him to come here!_ Heaven help you--heaven help you! It is you who are mad." And he hastened out of the room. CHAPTER X. THE ELDER PRINGLE SPEAKS. When Richard Pringle reached the street, he set off at a rapid walk for Lincoln's Inn Fields. His thoughts and feelings were too much disturbed for reasoning. The dialogue of the past hour hurried through his brain in an incoherent, inconsequential mass. In the intense excitement of the last few minutes, he had told her she was mad, and he almost believed it. He had known from the previous day that Blake had been at Crescent House on the night of Mr. Davenport's death. He had most plainly, most impressively given her to understand that he knew it. She must have seen plainly then he attached most disastrous importance to that visit of her former lover. Since then the leaf torn out of the pocket-book had been discovered. On that leaf appeared a deliberate accusation of murder in the handwriting of the dead man against Blake. That, in all reason, was sufficiently serious; but worse followed. She had the day after her husband's death asked this man Blake to visit her! From Blake she had, Pringle felt not the least doubt, adopted that elaborate and childish theory of the fatal event. Blake had told her in that interview a thing neither she nor his brother had ever known before--namely, that the deceased man had at one time, and to Blake's personal knowledge, suffered from mental aberration of a kind which would exactly explain away that damnatory writing on the paper--if any one could believe Blake's story! The whole affair was simply monstrous. If he viewed the matter from a purely professional point of view, he would have been heartily sorry he ever connected himself with it. But he could not regard the case solely as a matter between client and solicitor. He was under the spell of this woman, and he could not, if he would, and he would not if he could, escape. Only one thing was clear to his mind now, and that took the form of muttered words: "_There will be business for the hangman in this affair_." When he arrived at the office he found his father in, and having locked the door of the private room, he communicated to the old man the substance of the interview which had just been brought to a close. His father listened to the recital with the most circumstantial patience. When the son had finished his tale, and wound up with the opinion that some one was going to swing for the matter, the father, to the son's unspeakable astonishment, looked up cheerfully, and said: "I am not at all sure of that, Dick--not at all." "Bless my soul, father, where do you see the way out of it?"