Page:The Incredulity of Father Brown.pdf/263

The Doom of the Darnaways or souls. The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both ways they seem to be slaves."

"But I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things," said Dr. Barnet. "Don't you believe in heredity?"

"I said I believed in daylight," replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, "and I won't choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark about what really happened in that house."

"Do you mean about the suicide?" asked Payne.

"I mean about the murder," said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore.' It was murder: but murder is of the will, which God made free.'

What the other said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psycho-