and you won it."

"I won it," Francis admitted.

"Your defence was the most ingenious thing I ever heard."

"Mostly suggested, now I come to think of it," the barrister
remarked grimly, "by the prisoner himself."

"But why are you upset about it, anyway?" Wilmore persisted.

Francis rose to his feet, shook himself, and with his elbow
resting upon the mantelpiece leaned down towards his friend. He
could not rid himself altogether of this sense of unreality. He
had the feeling that he had passed through one of the great
crises of his life.

"I'll tell you, Andrew. You're about the only man in the world I
could tell. I've gone crazy."

"I thought you looked as though you'd been seeing spooks,"
Wilmore murmured sympathetically.

"I have seen a spook," Francis rejoined, with almost passionate
seriousness, "a spook who lifted an invisible curtain with
invisible fingers, and pointed to such a drama of horrors as De
Quincey, Poe and Sue combined could never have imagined. Oliver
Hilditch was guilty, Andrew. He murdered the man Jordan--murdered
him in cold blood."