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 only possible way, “your appeal is dismissed with costs—on the higher scale. What does it matter to me what happens to you? If you had had your way you would have earned a legal hanging four times in the last week. If your friends save the common hangman the trouble, so much the better for all concerned, especially as they would thereby get themselves hanged also.”

“Nothing will move you?”

“Absolutely nothing; and now I’ll trouble you to clear off the premises if you and your gentlemen outside don’t want to be treated as ordinary burglars.”

“What if I call them back and have you strangled?”

With the way of escape open behind him Forsyth laughed at the futile threat, and to the group outside in the Dutch garden it must have sounded like a friendly laugh of mutual satisfaction and farewell, for he gently pushed the old man before him to the garden door and shut it on him. Then, having carefully shot the heavy bolts, he groped his way back to the stone steps leading up into the house, triumphant, yet not wholly convinced. The ignominous collapse of Mr. Clinton Ziegler was