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68 heard—I was chucked out. I hadn't a chance against Francis."

"I believe you, Anthony," I answered. "And I'll do all I can to help you, but—who killed him? I feel certain it was not suicide."

The youngster said nothing—and again I felt that he knew, or suspected more than he could tell.

Who else was there, I asked myself, except his mother, Lady Laurence. She had certainly not visited the dead lieutenant after he went to the tower-room. The mystery was inscrutable—every track ended, as it were, in a blind alley.

Anthony asked me to stay at the house for a time and help his mother in her loneliness; for she, poor soul, was a stranger in the land, and the neighbourhood left her severely alone.

Lady Laurence, however, in a few days' time recovered from her severe prostration up to a point, but she sat, silent and wretched, day after day in her boudoir, saying nothing—but thinking all the time of her son in his prison cell.

Meanwhile I was not idle, and as the day for the trial at the Assizes at York approached I began to feel more hopeful.

"I think we shall clear him all right," I