"I ran out into the hall, calling to the French woman. She came, out of a door somewhere in the back part of the house, and I have a queer impression of her face by the light of a bracket lamp, almost ludicrous in its expression of fright. As I ran up the stairs I screamed to her to come, to follow me, and heard her steps racing along the passage and her panting exclamations of terror. At the stair head my ear caught the snap of a closing door and the click of a key turned in a lock. It came from the darkened end of the hall and as I ran down I cried to the woman, 'Get someone. Call. Get help.’ Then and there she threw up a window and thrusting out her head screamed into the darkness, ’_Au secours! Au secours!_' "A man’s voice, close under the window, answered her and she flew past me to another staircase beyond in the darkness down which I could hear her clattering rush. Then there were the sound of steps, and the breaking of wood, sharp tearing noises mixed with the shouts of men. It all came together, for as I stood outside that locked door, listening to the woman’s cries and the smashing of the wood below, sharp as a flash came the report of a pistol from the closed room. "That’s all. I didn’t see him again, I couldn’t. The police inspector—they’ve all been very kind, have done everything for me they could—let me see the statement. When you’ve read that you’ll know everything—it’ll be the last chapter. I can’t tell it to you—it’s more than I can bear." She glanced at me and then suddenly looked away for tears, quick and unexpected, welled into her eyes. She put up one hand, pressing it against her eyelids, while the other lay still on the table. I leaned forward and laid mine over it. As she sat speechless, struggling with her moment of weakness, I looked at the two hands—mine big and hard and brown, almost hid hers, closing round it, sheltering and guarding it, as my life, if God willed it, would close round and shelter and guard hers. ———— I am coming to the end of my part of the story and it’s only up to me now to give the final explanation—furnished by Harland’s statement—of the strangest crime that had ever come within the ken of the Whitney office. We all read the statement that day and that night in our sitting-room at the Frontenac, O’Mally, Babbitts and I talked it over. A good deal had to be supplemented by our own inside information. For anyone who had not our fuller knowledge there would have been many broken links in the chain. But to us it read as a clear, consecutive sequence of events. One thing I drew from it—almost as if Harland had told me himself—its unconscious revelation of the development in him of sinister possibilities that had lain dormant during the struggle of his early years. In middle life, his world conquered, two master passions, love of gain and love of a woman, had seized him, and swept him to his ruin.