dfully frightened. But
now--that I've been with you--it's better, much better. If only--" and
his voice caught--"if only--no one suspects."

Olva gravely answered, "No one suspects."

"If I thought that any one--that there was any chance--that any one had
an idea. . . ."

Craven's voice was echoing in Olva's ears. He answered again--

"No one has the slightest suspicion."

Bunning got up heavily from the chair--"I shall be better now. It's been
so awful having a secret. I never could keep one. I always used to do
wrong things at home and then tell them and then get punished. But I
will try. But if I thought that they guessed--" There was a rap on the
door and Bunning gasped, stepped back against the wall, his face white,
his knees trembling.

"Don't be such a fool," Olva said fiercely. "If you're like that every
time any one knocks you may as well chuck it at once. Look sensible,
man. Pull yourself together."

Lawrence entered, bringing log with him from the stairs. His big,
thick-set body was so reassuring, so healthy in its sturdiness, so
strange a contrast to the trembling figure against the wall that Olva
felt an immense relief.

"You know Bunning, Lawrence?"

"How do?"

Lawrence gripped Bunning's fingers, nodded to Bunning's stumbling words
and smiled genially.

Bunning got to the door, blinked upon them both from behind his glasses
and was gone--muttering something about "work . . . letters to write."

"Rum feller," said Lawrence, and dismissed him with a chuckle.
"Shouldn't ever have thought him your style, Dune . . . but you're a
clever feller and clever fellers always see more in stupid fellers than
ordinary fellers do . . . come out and see the rag."

"Rag! What rag?"

"It's November 5th."

So it was. In the air already perhaps there were those mysterious
signs and portents that heralded riot--nothing, as yet, for the casual
observer to notice, nothing but a few undergraduates arm-in-arm pacing
the sleepy streets--a policeman here, a policeman there. Every now and
again clocks strike the quarters, and in many common-rooms heads are
nodding over ancient Port and argument of the gentlest kind is being
tossed to and fro. But, nevertheless, we remember other Fifths of
November. There was that occasion in '98, that other more distant time
in '93. . . . There was that furious battle in the Market Place when the
Town Hall was nearly set on fire and a policeman had his arm broken.

These are hist