"There, then, I was, suddenly brought back to conscious life by the merest accident. In my sleep, in obedience to some somnambulistic impulse, I had unlocked and opened the old secretaire in the library in which are stored a number of family papers. In shutting down the lid, I had accidentally trapped my finger, and the pain thereby caused me had been sufficient to awake me. I stared around in an effort to collect my amazed faculties. Then the truth dawned upon me. Very similar experiences had been mine before, although not oftener than once or twice since my marriage. Of all that must have happened up stairs prior to the moment of my awaking I retain no faintest shadow of recollection. "Presently I turned and left the house by the way I had entered it--that is to say, by the little side door in the north wing, which the butler has orders to leave unbolted and merely locked when I am from home, so that I can let myself in at any hour of the day or night by means of my pass key. So far as I am aware, not a creature saw me either enter the house or leave it. And then, after a while, I found myself here." A silence ensued, which Roden Marsh was the first to break. "I wholly fail to see how, in the eye of the law, a man can be held to be even partially accountable for anything that may happen, or any deed he may commit, while in a state of somnambulism." Drelincourt lighted another cigarette before speaking. Then he said: "But where are my witnesses to prove I was in that state when this morning's tragedy took place?" "For the matter of that, where are the witnesses to prove you had any hand at all in the affair?" "I know of none." "Then, as it seems to me, all you and I have to do is simply to keep our own counsel, and let the affair work itself out as best it may." To this Drelincourt apparently found nothing to reply. Roden lapsed into a brown study. "No," he said, after a pause, with a shake of his head, "neither legally nor morally can you be held accountable for this morning's work." Drelincourt flicked the ash off his cigarette. "And I am just as convinced that if the crime is brought home to me, the law will find me guilty and hang me in due course. What judge or jury would for one moment give credence to my plea of somnambulism? It would be brushed aside as an attempt, at once foolish and futile, to escape the consequences of my act. Pray disabuse your mind on that point, my dear Rodd. And now, as regards the moral guilt of the act. If the notion of my wife's death, and of the vast difference such an event would make to me, had not been a factor--embryonic, if you will--in my mind, if it had not found receptivity there, would it ever have evolved itself in action in the way it has done?" "For all that, a man who, while sleep walking, kills another cannot be deemed guilty of murder," protested Rodd dogmatically.