I could fancy the outraged and mystified old gentleman demanding an explanation, and before long exploding with wrath, the thief standing hopelessly convicted—caught "with the goods."
Suddenly the struggle is precipitated by the infuriated householder endeavoring to recover his property. We may safely assume that it was by no gentle means that he sought to do this, and at once the battle wages to and fro between the head of the stairs and the lateral passage, quite up to the bath room door. The thief is striving to retain the leather box, the other to wrest it from him.
It is pretty certain, too, that the old gentleman hastily put down the iron candlestick before he grasped the box—on the floor, somewhere near the western angle of the balustrade—and in the end, as the combat in one of its uncertain revolutions sweeps past it, the thief frees himself with a desperate effort, snatches it from the floor, and becomes an assassin in actu.
The dull impact of the blow, as the scene is blinded by sudden darkness; the crash of the body against the railing; the dominant jar when the body strikes upon the landing below—and the dark deed is accomplished.
What next follows?
Panic on the part of the murderer, we may be sure, as he stands one second in a stupor of horror at what he has done; then he must have flown—whither?
It is at this juncture that Alexander Burke steps into the hall, and beholds nothing in the light of his own candle. It is at this point that Royal Maillot springs from his bed, collides with the open wardrobe door, and straightway forgets the tumult in his own physical suffering, until Burke raps upon his door. And it is at this point that, unless there was some third person in the house, either one or the other of these two young men has deliberately lied. In turning them both loose I trusted to convict the guilty man by his own conduct. It will develop how far my course was justified.
The mute but vivid testimony would seem to lead, step by step and with irresistible logic, straight to the private secretary—had it not been for two circumstances which placed him once for all beyond the possibility of having been the person who struck the blow.
First, he would have been but as a babe in Felix Page's powerful grasp; there would have been no struggle at all.
Second, the fellow was an arrant coward, and he would never have offered the least resistance unless convinced that he was in imminent peril of his life—which was improbable.