"The staircase in question," continued Ephraim, "is exactly opposite the door of Mr. Hazeldine's room, and anyone going up it, or coming down it, can, if so minded, obtain a view of the interior of the office through the fanlight over the door--a fact which my curiosity had led me to take advantage of on more occasions than one. On the night of Mr. Hazeldine's death, after John Brancker had gone and I had put my own work away, led by a vague curiosity, I stole halfway up the staircase and peered through the fanlight. Mr. Hazeldine's table, with Mr. Hazeldine seated at it, were clearly visible to me. Sir--Mr. Clement--while I was looking, I saw your father take out of a drawer in his table the very knife which was found near him on the floor next morning, and with which he was said to have been stabbed! He stared at it for a moment or two and tested its point with his thumb; then he unbuttoned his waistcoat, and with his left hand seemed to feel for the exact spot over his heart. Then he let the knife drop, and leaning forward over the table, he covered his face with his hands. With that, being not a little scared, I waited to see no more." Clement sat with ashen face and horror-fraught eyes, waiting till the shock which Ephraim's words had caused him should in some measure have spent its force. "You drew an inference of some kind from what you saw through the fanlight," he at length contrived to say, "What was the inference?" "That Mr. Hazeldine came by his death by his own hand," replied Ephraim in a whisper. When Clement Hazeldine called on his patient next morning he found him delirious, and on the following day Ephraim died. CHAPTER XXVI. THE BROTHERS. Ephraim Judd's deathbed confession naturally divided itself into two parts in Clement Hazeldine's afterthoughts, of which the first had reference exclusively to John Brancker, while the second, which in Clem's eyes far exceeded the other in importance, concerned almost wholly his brother and himself. The horror with which he had listened to the latter portion of Ephraim's narrative toned itself down by degrees to a feeling of doubt, and from that, by an easy transition, to one of absolute incredulity. His father commit suicide! The bare idea of such a thing, to anyone who had known the man, was utterly preposterous. But supposing for a moment that the case had been as Ephraim implied, there still remained the robbery of the safe, which had been a concomitant incident of Mr. Hazeldine's death, to be accounted for. The truth was that the sick man's mind had wandered in the course of the previous night, and he had imagined circumstances which had never really happened. During illness the boundary line which divides the realm of fancy from that of fact is easily overpassed, and the weakened mind of the patient is unable to distinguish between the two. That such was the explanation in Ephraim's case it seemed impossible to doubt.