the accident at the tomb. Even as he entered, Leonard Smyth was saying: "Where is all this going to end?"
"It will never end, I tell you," repeated Lady Diana, gazing into vacancy with glassy eyes; "it will never end till we all end. One after another the curse will take us; perhaps slowly, as the poor vicar said; but it will take us all as it has taken him."
"What in the world has happened now?" asked Father Brown.
There was a silence, and then Tarrant said in a voice that sounded a little hollow:
"Mr. Walters, the Vicar, has committed suicide. I suppose it was the shock unhinged him. But I fear there can be no doubt about it. We've just found his black hat and clothes on a rock jutting out from the shore. He seems to have jumped into the sea. I thought he looked as if it had knocked him half-witted, and perhaps we ought to have looked after him; but there was so much to look after."
"You could have done nothing," said the lady. "Don't you see the thing is dealing doom in a sort of dreadful order? The Professor touched the cross, and he went first; the Vicar had opened the tomb, and he went second; we only entered the chapel, and we———"
"Hold on," said Father Brown, in a sharp voice he very seldom used; "this has got to stop."
He still wore a heavy though unconscious
175
