saw blood, a small black automatic pistol lying close to one of Leggett's hands, and seven unset diamonds grouped close to his head.
O'Gar said, "Take a look," and handed me part of his sheaf―four sheets of stiff white paper covered with very small, precise and plain handwriting in black ink. I was getting interested in what was written when Fitzstephan and Collinson came to the door with the girl.
Collinson saw what had happened in a glance. His face went white, and he put his big body between the girl and her dead father.
"Come in," I said.
"This is no place for Miss Leggett, in her condition," he replied hotly, turning to take her away.
We ought to have everybody in here," I told O'Gar. He nodded his bullet head at the policeman, who put a hand on Collinson's shoulder and said: "You'll have to come in, the both of you."
Fitzstephan placed a chair by one of the end windows for the girl. She sat in it and looked around the room―at the dead man, at Mrs. Leggett, who had not looked up, at all of us―with eyes that were dull, but no longer completely blank. Collinson stood beside her chair, looking belligerently at me.
I addressed O'Gar loudly enough for the rest to hear:
"Let's read Leggett's letter out loud."
He screwed up his eyes, hesitated, then thrust the rest of the sheets at me, saying:
"Fair enough. You read it."
Not wanting the job, I passed it on to Owen Fitzstephan. Standing beside me, he read:
Shortly after my marriage I had discovered that I had made a terrible mistake, that it was really Alice, and not Lily, whom I loved. I kept this discovery to myself until the child was past the more difficult baby years, that is, until she was nearly five. Then I told my wife, and asked her to divorce me so I could marry Alice. She refused.
On June 6, 1913, I shot and killed Lily, and fled with Alice and Gabrielle to London, where I was soon arrested and returned to Paris. There I was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Alice, who had no part in the murder, and who had been horrified by it, and had gone to London with me only through her love for the child, was also tried, but, justly, acquitted.
If there is any humanity or human likeness left in me, it is not the fault of those who have made Devil's Island the almost perfect hell it is. In 1918 I escaped with a fellow convict named Jacques Labaud on a flimsy raft. Neither of us knew how long we were adrift in the ocean, nor, toward the last, how long we had been without food and water. A week, perhaps, but every hour was a new eternity. Then Labaud died. He died of exposure and starvation. I did not kill him. No living creature could have been feeble enough for me to kill. But when Labaud was dead there was enough food for one, and I lived until I was washed ashore in the Golfo Trieste.
Changing my name to Armand Bacot, I secured employment with a British copper mining company at Aroa, and within a few months became private secretary to Philip Howart, the resident manager. Shortly