“When this man's clothing was searched,” observed the Coroner, “a box of pills was found, Dr. Ransford, on which your writing appears. Had you been attending him--professionally?” “Yes,” replied Ransford. “Both Collishaw and his wife. Or, rather, to be exact, I had been in attendance on the wife, for some weeks. A day or two before his death, Collishaw complained to me of indigestion, following on his meals. I gave him some digestive pills--the pills you speak of, no doubt.” “These?” asked the Coroner, passing over the box which Mitchington had found. “Precisely!” agreed Ransford. “That, at any rate, is the box, and I suppose those to be the pills.” “You made them up yourself?” inquired the Coroner. “I did--I dispense all my own medicines.” “Is it possible that the poison we have beard of, just now, could get into one of those pills--by accident?” “Utterly impossible!--under my hands, at any rate,” answered Ransford. “Still, I suppose, it could have been administered in a pill?” suggested the Coroner. “It might,” agreed Ransford. “But,” he added, with a significant glance at the medical men who had just given evidence. “It was not so administered in this case, as the previous witnesses very well know!” The Coroner looked round him, and waited a moment. “You are at liberty to explain--that last remark,” he said at last. “That is--if you wish to do so.” “Certainly!” answered Ransford, with alacrity. “Those pills are, as you will observe, coated, and the man would swallow them whole--immediately after his food. Now, it would take some little time for a pill to dissolve, to disintegrate, to be digested. If Collishaw took one of my pills as soon as he had eaten his dinner, according to instructions, and if poison had been in that pill, he would not have died at once--as he evidently did. Death would probably have been delayed some little time until the pill had dissolved. But, according to the evidence you have had before you, he died quite suddenly while eating his dinner--or immediately after it. I am not legally represented here--I don't consider it at all necessary--but I ask you to recall Dr. Coates and to put this question to him: Did he find one of those digestive pills in this man's stomach?” The Coroner turned, somewhat dubiously, to the two doctors who had performed the autopsy. But before he could speak, the superintendent of police rose and began to whisper to him, and after a conversation between them, he looked round at the jury, every member of which had evidently been much struck by Ransford's suggestion. “At this stage,” he said, “it will be necessary to adjourn. I shall adjourn the inquiry for a week, gentlemen. You will--” Ransford, still standing in the witness-box, suddenly lost control of himself. He uttered a sharp exclamation and smote the ledge before him smartly with his open hand.