gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the
thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door. The
man started up and held him back.

"'Keep where you are,' he said hoarsely. 'It is nothing. Your mistress
is frightened, that is all. She must learn to get over this folly.' Then
he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like
a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence.

"And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his life
came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with
eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct
moved together towards the place where the silence came from.

"When the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead
python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its
comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody
heap in the middle of the floor.

"He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened
his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before
he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the
living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others
burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found
the second python with its head torn off.

"That is the incident that changed the character of my man--if it be
changed," concluded Jephson. "He told it me one night as we sat on the
deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay. He did not spare himself. He
told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even,
monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind. I asked him, when he had
finished, how he could bear to recall it.

"'Recall it!' he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; 'it is always
with me.'"

CHAPTER VIII

One day we spoke of crime and criminals. We had discussed the
possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would
be uninteresting.

"It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly;
"but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for
our friends the bad people. Do you know," he continued, "when I hear of
folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them
good, I get positively nervous. Once do away with sin, and literature
will become a thing of the past. Without the criminal classes we authors