compared it with the message on the crumpled paper no doubt remained. Taylor himself had written those obscure and provocative words.
Garth found the pencil on the floor beneath the bed, as if it had rolled there when Taylor had dropped it. The place at the moment had nothing else to offer him beyond an abnormally large array in the bath room of bottles containing for the most part stimulants and sedatives. They merely strengthened, by suggesting that Taylor was an invalid, his appearance of suicide.
The coroner and Taylor's doctor, who came together, only added to the puzzle. The coroner declared unreservedly for suicide, and, in reply to Garth's anxious question, swore that no measurable time could have elapsed between the firing of the shot, which had pierced the heart, and Taylor's death. The physician was satisfied even after Garth confidentially had shown him the note.
"Mr. Taylor," he said then, "understood he had an incurable trouble. Every one knows that his wife, whom he worshipped, had practically left him by going to California for so long. It may have appealed to a grim sense of humour, not unusual with chronic invalids, to puzzle us with that absurdly worded note. I might tell you, too, that Mr. Taylor for some time had had a fear that he might go out of his head. Perpetually he questioned me about insanity, and wanted to know what treatment I would give him if his mind went."
Garth, however, when they had left, went to the
