strong toe-tip surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift Our
gentleman, from where he hovered, and while looking straight at the
master of the scene, yet saw, as by the tiny flash of a reflection from
fine metal, _under_ the chair. What he recognised, or at least guessed
at, as sinister, made him for a moment turn cold, and that chill was on
him while Winch again addressed him--as differently as possible from any
manner yet used. "I beg of you in God's name to talk to me--to _talk_ to
me!"

It had the ring of pure alarm and anguish, but was by this turn at least
more human than the dazzling glitter of intelligence to which the poor
man had up to now been treating him. "It's you, my good friend, who are
in deep trouble," Mark was accordingly quick to reply, "and I ask your
pardon for being so taken up with my own sorry business."

"Of course I'm in deep trouble"--with which Winch came nearer again;
"but turning you on was exactly what I wanted."

Mark Monteith, at this, couldn't, for all his rising dismay, but
laugh out; his sense of the ridiculous so swallowed up, for that brief
convulsion, his sense of the sinister. Of such conivence in pain,
it seemed, was the fact of another's pain, and of so much worth again
disinterested sympathy! "Your interest was then----?"

"My interest was in your being interesting. For you _are!_ And my
nerves--!" said Newton Winch with a face from which the mystifying
smile had vanished, yet in which distinction, as Mark so persistently
appreciated it, still sat in the midst of ravage.

Mark wondered and wondered--he made strange things out. "Your nerves
have needed company." He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly
before he had felt Winch's own pressure of possession and detention. "As
good for you yourself, that--or still better," he went on--"than I and
my grievance were to have found you. Talk to we, talk to we, Newton
Winch!" he added with an immense inspiration of charity.

"That's a different matter--that others but too much can do! But I'll
say this. If you want to go to Phil Bloodgood----!"

"Well?" said Mark as he stopped. He stopped, and Mark had now a hand on
each of his shoulders and held him at arm's-length, held him with a fine
idea that was not disconnected from the sight of the small neat weapon
he had been fingering in the low luxurious morocco chair--it was of the
finest orange colour--and then had laid beside him on the carpet; where,
after he h