lordship will perhaps
not forgive me for it. I let drop a word that I suspected something
before that man Gorton, and he asked me what I meant; and I explained
it away, and said I was chaffing him. And I have been all this time, up
to a few weeks ago, learning the true particulars of how his lordship
died."

Lord Hartledon decided that the man's mind was undoubtedly wandering.

But Pike was not wandering. And he told the story of the boy Ripper
having been locked up in the mill. Mr. Ripper was almost a match for Pike
himself in deceit; and Pike had only learned the facts by dint of long
patience and perseverance and many threats. The boy had seen the whole
accident; had watched it from the window where he was enclosed, unable to
get out, unless he had torn away the grating. Lord Hartledon had lost all
command of the little skiff, his arm being utterly disabled; and it came
drifting down towards the mill, and struck against the estrade. The skiff
righted itself at once, but not its owner: there was a slight struggle, a
few cries, and he lay motionless, drifting later to the place where he
was found. Mr. Ripper's opinion was that he had lost his senses with the
blow on the temple, and fell an easy prey to death. Had that gentleman
only sacrificed the grating and his own reputation, he might have saved
him easily; and that fact had since been upon his conscience, making him
fear all sorts of things, not the least of which was that he might be
hanged as a murderer.

This story he had told Pike at the time, with one reserve--he persisted
that he had not _seen_, only heard. Pike saw that the boy was still
not telling the whole truth, and suspected he was screening Lord
Hartledon--he who now stood before him. Mr. Ripper's logic tended to the
belief that he could not be punished if he stuck to the avowal of having
seen nothing. He had only heard the cries; and when Pike asked if they
were cries as if he were being assaulted, the boy evasively answered
"happen they were." Another little item he suppressed: that he found the
purse at the bottom of the skiff, after he got out of the mill, and
appropriated it to himself; and when he had fairly done that, he grew
more afraid of having done it than of all the rest. The money he
secreted, using it when he dared, a sixpence at a time; the case, with
its papers, he buried in the spot where his master afterwards found it.
With all this upon the young man's conscience, no wonder he was