nervous type," said the Dean, whose weakness
it was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormous
families, as "neurotic."

"Of course," said Hickle, "it isn't absolutely necessary for him to go
up because he has invented--"

"How COULD he avoid it?" asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadow
of scorn.

"It's certainly most unfortunate if he's going to be ill now," said Mrs.
Banghurst a little severely.

"He's not going to be ill," said the Lady Mary, and certainly she had
met Filmer's eye.

"YOU'LL be all right," said Banghurst, as they went towards the
pavilion. "All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, you
know. You'll be--you'd get it rough, you know, if you let another man--"

"Oh, I want to go," said Filmer. "I shall be all right. As a matter of
fact I'm almost inclined NOW--. No! I think I'll have that nip of brandy
first."

Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty
decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps five
minutes.

The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals
Filmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of the
stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out, and
then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind the
grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward with a
tray.

The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant
little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau--for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hung
with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But as
it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with on
the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin with
three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer went up and down
that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went first towards
the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neat
little red label

".22 LONG."

The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.

Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there
were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by a
lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler opened the
door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says, wh