of his dinner, nor in the liquid in his tin bottle, which was old tea.  But of the cause of his sudden death there was no more doubt than of the effects.  Ransford had been in the court from the outset of the proceedings, and when the medical evidence had been given he was called.  Bryce, watching him narrowly, saw that he was suffering from repressed excitement—­and that that excitement was as much due to anger as to anything else.  His face was set and stern, and he looked at the Coroner with an expression which portended something not precisely clear at that moment.  Bryce, trying to analyse it, said to himself that he shouldn’t be surprised if a scene followed—­Ransford looked like a man who is bursting to say something in no unmistakable fashion.  But at first he answered the questions put to him calmly and decisively.

“When this man’s clothing was searched,” observed the Coroner, “a box of pills was found, Dr. Ransford, on which your writing appears.  Had you been attending him—­professionally?”

“Yes,” replied Ransford.  “Both Collishaw and his wife.  Or, rather, to be exact, I had been in attendance on the wife, for some weeks.  A day or two before his death, Collishaw complained to me of indigestion, following on his meals.  I gave him some digestive pills—­the pills you speak of, no doubt.”

“These?” asked the Coroner, passing over the box which Mitchington had found.

“Precisely!” agreed Ransford.  “That, at any rate, is the box, and I suppose those to be the pills.”

“You made them up yourself?” inquired the Coroner.

“I did—­I dispense all my own medicines.”

“Is it possible that the poison we have beard of, just now, could get into one of those pills—­by accident?”

“Utterly impossible!—­under my hands, at any rate,” answered Ransford.

“Still, I suppose, it could have been administered in a pill?” suggested the Coroner.

“It might,” agreed Ransford.  “But,” he added, with a significant glance at the medical men who had just given evidence.  “It was not so administered in this case, as the previous witnesses very well know!”

The Coroner looked round him, and waited a moment.

“You are at liberty to explain—­that last remark,” he said at last.  “That is—­if you wish to do so.”  “Certainly!” answered Ransford, with alacrity.  “Those pills are, as you will observe, coated, and the man would swallow them whole—­immediately after his food.  Now, it would take some little time for a pill to dissolve, to disintegrate, to be digested.  If Collishaw took one of my pills as soon as he had eaten his dinner, according to instructions, and if poison had been in that pill, he would not have died at once—­as he evidently did.  Death would probably have been delayed some little time until the pill had dissolved.  But, according to the evidence you have had before you, he died quite suddenly while eating his dinner—­or immediately after it.  I am not legally represented here—­I don’t consider it at all necessary —­but I ask you to recall Dr. Coates and to put this question to him:  Did he find one of those digestive pills in this man’s stomach?”