He knew that it was thirty or forty feet above the level of the ground--but there was much thick ivy growing on the walls of Normandale Grange, and it might be possible to climb down by its aid. With a great effort he forced open one of the dirt-encrusted sashes and looked out--and in the same instant he drew in his head with a harsh groan. The window commanded a full view of the hall door--and he had seen Prydale, and two other detectives, and the stranger from London whom he believed to be a detective, hurrying from their motorcar into the house. There was but one thing for it, now. Esther Mawson had robbed him of everything that was on him in the way of papers and money. But in his hip-pocket she had left a revolver which Pratt had carried, always loaded, for some time. And now, without the least hesitation, he drew it out and sent one of its bullets through his brain. * * * * * Eldrick and Collingwood, returning to the hall from the room in which they and the detectives had found Pratt's dead body, stood a little later in earnest conversation with Prydale, who had just come there from an interview with Esther Mawson. Nesta Mallathorpe suddenly called to them from the stairs, at the same time beckoning them to go up to her. "Will you come with me and speak to my mother?" she said. "She knows you are here, and she wants to say something about what has happened--something about that document which Pratt said he possessed." Eldrick and Collingwood exchanged glances without speaking. They followed Nesta into her mother's sitting-room. And instead of the semi-invalid whom they had expected to find there, they saw a woman who had evidently regained not only her vivacity and her spirits but her sense of authority and her inclination to exercise it. "I am sorry that you gentlemen should have been drawn into all this wretched business!" she exclaimed, as she pointed the two men to chairs. "Everything must seem very strange, and indeed have seemed so for some time. But I have been the victim of as bad a scoundrel as ever lived--I'm not going to be so hypocritical as to pretend that I'm sorry he's dead--I'm not! I only wish he'd met his proper fate--on the scaffold. I don't know what you may have heard, or gathered--my daughter herself, from what she tells me, has only the vaguest notions--but I wanted to tell you, Mr. Eldrick, and you, Mr. Collingwood--seeing that you're one a solicitor and the other a barrister, that Pratt invented a most abominable plot against me, which, of course, hasn't a word of truth in it, yet was so clever that----" Eldrick suddenly raised his hand.