justice your murderer. All consideration, or
feeling, for what seemed to be latent virtues in that strange and
inexplicable man, Varney, shall vanish, and he shall reap the
consequences of the crime he has now committed."

"It was a cold blooded, cowardly murder," said his brother.

"It was; but you may depend the doctor was about to reveal something to
us, which Varney so much dreaded, that he took his life as the only
effectual way, at the moment, of stopping him."

"It must be so," said Henry.

"And now," said the admiral, "it's too late, and we shall not know it at
all. That's the way. A fellow saves up what he has got to tell till it
is too late to tell it, and down he goes to Davy Jones's locker with all
his secrets aboard."

"Not always," said Dr. Chillingworth, suddenly sitting bolt
upright--"not always."

Henry and his brother started back in amazement, and the admiral was so
taken by surprise, that had not the resuscitated doctor suddenly
stretched out his hand and laid hold of him by the ankle, he would have
made a precipitate retreat.

"Hilloa! murder!" he cried. "Let me go! How do I know but you may be a
vampyre by now, as you were shot by one."

Henry soonest recovered from the surprise of the moment, and with the
most unfeigned satisfaction, he cried,--

"Thank God you are unhurt, Dr. Chillingworth! Why he must have missed
you by a miracle."

"Not at all," said the doctor. "Help me up--thank you--all right. I'm
only a little singed about the whiskers. He hit me safe enough."

"Then how have you escaped?"

"Why from the want of a bullet in the pistol, to be sure. I can
understand it all well enough. He wanted to create sufficient confusion
to cover a desperate attempt to escape, and he thought that would be
best done by seeming so shoot me. The suddenness of the shock, and the
full belief, at the moment, that he had sent a bullet into my brains,
made me fall, and produced a temporary confusion of ideas, amounting to
insensibility."

"From which you are happily recovered. Thank Heaven that, after all, he
is not such a villain as this act would have made him."

"Ah!" said the admiral, "it takes people who have lived a little in
these affairs to know the difference in sound between a firearm with a
bullet in it, and one without. I knew it was all right."

"Then why did you not say so, admiral?"

"What was the use? I thought the doctor might be amused to know what you
should say of him, s