clear to me. I did not feel called on to volunteer
any statement of my own private convictions;
in the first place, because my doing so could
serve no practical purpose, now that all proof in
support of any surmises of mine was burnt with
the burnt register; in the second place, because
I could not have intelligibly stated my opinion—
my unsupported opinion—without disclosing the
whole story of the conspiracy; and producing
the same unsatisfactory effect on the minds of
the coroner and the jury which I had already
produced on the mind of Mr. Kyrle.

In these pages, however, and after the time
that has now elapsed, no such cautions and
restraints as are here described need fetter the
free expression of my opinion. I will state,
before my pen occupies itself with other events,
how my own convictions lead me to account
for the abstraction of the keys, for the outbreak
of the fire, and for the death of the man.

The news of my being unexpectedly free on
bail, drove Sir Percival, as I believe, to his last
resources. The attempted attack on the road was
one of those resources; and the suppression of
all practical proof of his crime, by destroying the
page of the register on which the forgery had
been committed, was the other, and the surest
of the two. If I could produce no extract from
the original book, to compare with the certified
copy at Knowlesbury, I could produce no positive
evidence, and could threaten him with no
fatal exposure. All that was necessary to his
end was, that he should get into the vestry
unperceived, that he should tear out the page in
the register, and that he should leave the vestry
again as privately as he had entered it.

On this supposition, it is easy to understand
why he waited until nightfall before he made the
attempt, and why he took advantage of the
clerk's absence to possess himself of the keys
Necessity would oblige him to strike a light to
find his way to the right register; and common
caution would suggest his locking the door on
the inside, in case of intrusion on the part of
any inquisitive stranger, or on my part, if I
happened to be in the neighbourhood at the time.

I cannot believe that it was any part of his
intention to make the destruction of the register
appear to be the result of accident, by purposely
setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that
prompt assistance might arrive, and that the
books might, by the remotest possibility, be
saved, would have been enough, on a moment's
consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort
from his mind. Remembering the quantity of
combustible objects in the vestry—the straw
the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the
old worm-eaten presses—all the probabilities, in
my estimation, point to the fire as the result of.
an accident with his matches or his light.

His first impulse, under these circumstances
was doubtless to try to extinguish the flames—
and, failing in that, his second impulse (ignorant
as he was of the state of the lock) had been to
attempt to escape by the door which had given
him entrance. When I had called to him
the flames must have extended across the door
leading into the church, on either side of which
the presses extended, and close to which the
other combustible objects were placed. In all
probability, the smoke and flame (confined as
they were to the room) had been too much for
him, when he tried to escape by the inner
door. He must have dropped in his death-
swoon—he must have sunk in the place where
he was found—just as I got on the roof to break the
skylight-window. Even if we had been able,
afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst
open the door from that side, the delay must
have been fatal. He would have been past
saving, long past saving, by that time. We
should only have given the flames free ingress
into the church: the church, which was now
preserved, but which, in that event, would have
shared the fate of the vestry. There is no doubt
in my mind—there can be no doubt in the mind
of any one—that he was a dead man before ever
we got to the empty cottage, and worked with
might and main to tear down the beam.

This is the nearest approach that any theory
of mine can make towards accounting for a result
which was visible matter of fact. As I have
described them, so events passed to us outside.
As I have related it, so his body was found.

The Inquest was adjourned over one day; no
explanation that the eye of the law could recognise
having been discovered, thus far, to account
for the mysterious circumstances of the case.

It was arranged that more witnesses should
be summoned, and that the London solicitor of
the deceased should be invited to attend. A
medical man was also charged with the duty of
reporting on the mental condition of the servant,
which appeared at present to debar him from
giving any evidence of the least importance. He
could only declare, in a dazed way, that he had
been ordered, on the night of the fire, to wait
in the lane, and that he knew nothing else,
except that the deceased was certainly his master.
My own impression was, that he had been first
used (without any guilty knowledge on his own
part) to ascertain the fact of the clerk's absence
from home on the previous day; and that he
had been afterwards ordered to wait near the
church (but out of sight of the vestry) to assist
his master, in the event of my escaping the attack
on the road, and of a collision occurring between
Sir Percival and myself. It is necessary to add,
that the man's own testimony was never obtained
to confirm this view. The medical report
of him declared that what little mental faculty
he possessed was seriously shaken; nothing
satisfactory was extracted from him at the adjourned
Inquest; and, for aught I know to the contrary,
he may never have recovered to this day.

I returned to the hotel at Welmingham, so
jaded in body and mind, so weakened and
depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be
quite unfit to endure the local gossip about the
Inquest, and to answer the trivial questions that
the talkers addressed to me in the coffee-room.
I withdrew from my scanty dinner to my cheap
garret-chamber, to secure myself a little quiet,