“But how more? Is it possible, for instance, for a person to half-drown and then seemingly recover; to be put to bed nearly himself again, and yet be found dead in the morning?” “How can I say? In such a case there must be gross carelessness or quite unexpected complications.” “But if I tell you I once heard of this happening--was witness, indeed, of the fact?” The doctor lifted his shoulder, adjusted his spectacles and shrugged himself with an awkward posture of skepticism. “How did he look?” he said. “Dreadful--swollen, horribly distorted. His face was black--his hands clenched. He seemed to have died in great pain.” He gave a little scornful sniff. “Do you want my opinion on that?” he cried. “Well--here it is: It was a case for the police. No drowned man ever looked after that fashion.” “Then you think he must have come to his death by other means, and after he was put to bed?” “I haven’t the least doubt about it whatsoever, if it was all as you say.” I gave a thin, sudden cry. I couldn’t help it--it was forced from me. Then, of my own act, I pulled the cloth once more over the dead face. It had spoken to me in such a manner as its love had never expressed in life. “You have vindicated me, my sweetheart of the old days,” I murmured. “Good-by, Dolly, till I may witness your love that is undying in another world.” I think the doctor fancied that the trouble of the night had turned my brain. What did it matter what he thought--what anybody thought now? I stood acquitted at the bar of my own conscience. In my first knowledge of that stupendous relief I could find no place for one other sentiment but crazy gratitude. As I stood, half-stunned in the shock of emotion, the officer I awaited entered the room bearing in his hand a slip of paper. “The letter’s detained,” he said, “but this here’s the address it’s wrote from, and you’d better act upon it without delay.” With a tremendous effort I swept together my scattered faculties and took it from him. It was not much information that the paper contained--an address only from a certain “Nelson terrace” in Battersea--but such as it was I held it in common with Duke, whose sole advantage was a brief start of me. Calling back my thanks to the friendly constable, I hurried into the street and so off and away in wild pursuit. Still as I ran a phantom voice went with me, crying: “You did not kill him--your brother Modred.” The rapture of it kept time to my hurrying footsteps; it flew over and with me, like the albatross of hope, and brought the breeze of a healthfuler promise on its wings; it spoke from the faces of people I passed, as if they wished me to know as I swept by that I was no longer in their eyes a man of blood. “You did not kill him!” it sung in my brain--“you did not kill him--you did not kill him”--then all in a moment, with a dying shock: “Who did?”