That brings me to the death of Ronald Mirlees. Frankly, in spite of the mysterious and inexplicable nature of his end, which baffled doctors and public alike, I incline to think that he himself was under a delusion as to its cause--particularly as a far simpler explanation occurs to me. Men of Mirlees' stamp, who in their quest of knowledge plunge into the perilous underworld of native life, with its secret organisations and obscure religious cults, often meet with a fate as dark as the matters they went out to explore. Many such cases lie buried in the dusty official files of the East. Sometimes it is a jealously guarded secret filched, sometimes a criminal betrayed to justice, but always there is the possibility that sooner or later the rash foreigner who has ventured into such deep waters will pay for his temerity with his life. Mirlees, as I knew, was in the habit of thus diving into the underworld, where his knowledge of native life and language enabled him to move in a way that would have been possible to few other foreigners living; and he was, as I also knew, a man utterly devoid of fear and not greatly gifted with common prudence. In this manuscript he represents himself as having incurred the wrath of a secret, semi-religious society whose members were also on the track of the hidden land of diamonds. Blood had been shed--it may have been the blood of men highly placed in the organisation; and his story of the renewed attempts on his life when he had ventured back into China bears to my mind the character of extreme probability. Also, I am inclined to believe that one of these attempts finally succeeded. The murder may have been effected by means of some subtle native poison which no European doctor could detect--it will be remembered that he records an attempt of the kind as having been already made and frustrated. His own belief--that he was being done to death by mental force acting at a great distance--seems wild enough, but by no means hard to understand after the experiences through which he had passed. The amazing powers of the people of Hellas had obviously left a profound impression upon his mind, so much so that he was able to put forward the astonishing hypothesis that the mechanism of those artificial wings on which he fled from the valley was actuated by _isolated brain force_; the grim mystery surrounding the death of Major Poyning would still further deepen this impression; and Mirlees' dream-interview with the Princess Euphrosune--I prefer to regard this as merely a dream, since at his meeting with Saunders Philipson on the following night the latter appears to have made no mention either of it or of Mirlees' supposed oath of secrecy--may well have rendered the delusion complete. All this, taken in conjunction with the cumulative horror of the several attempts on his life, would seem to me to afford an adequate explanation of Mirlees' extraordinary belief.