"Though convinced that he was dead, I hoped against hope for some hours. Then _rigor mortis_ set in, and I knew that the only man who had ever inflicted an injury on my good name had struck his last and shrewdest blow by dying in my house. I want you to consider the position I was in. A man, a stranger, was lying there dead, in circumstances that demanded an inquest. I had not called for a doctor, or obtained any assistance locally. I had sent my wife and daughter to a foreign country, obviously to get them out of the way. A _post-mortem_ examination would show that death had taken place nearly a day before I made any stir. If I destroyed certain documents in my brother's possession--such, for instance, as a ticket of leave, which he had retained long after its expiry for the mere purpose, I firmly believe, of bringing pressure to bear on me--there would be nothing to show his identity. In a word, there was a _prima facie_ case of murder ready to be established against me. Of course, the medical evidence would go to prove my innocence, but all the world--all of my small world, at any rate--would gape and gossip because of the scandal which my wife and I had given more than twenty years of our life to escape. For the sake of my wife and daughter I resolved upon a daring expedient. The 'Ogilvey fraud' of a previous generation was forgotten. Why should I not resume my own name, and let my brother die and be buried as Stephen Garth? I saw that my own behavior during the past week would help the assumption that I had committed suicide, while a rather marked resemblance between my brother and myself, together with the fact that he had died from apoplexy, would complete the illusion. Moreover, there exists, in connection with this very house, a curious legend which condemned seven generations of its owners to die by violence, either self-inflicted, or caused by others. James Ogilvey's death was the seventh, and I trusted to this alleged prophecy of a Spanish priest put to death by a sea-rover named Faulkner in the seventeenth century being sufficiently well known in connection with a shadow, or manifestation, cast on the wall by a stained-glass window in the staircase. "At any rate, I steeled my heart to a dreadful undertaking, dressed my brother in my own clothes, tied his body to a hook in the hall where the shadow I have spoken of is seen at this time of the year, and stole away across the moor after writing a letter to the coroner.