e an engine, and the futile wear and tear was beginning to tell on
the whole machinery. To be sure, he had written a little in a desultory
way, but I never thought his heart was in his pen, and his fastidious
taste was a deterrent rather than a spur. Yet he railed about the bread
of idleness, said a man should be fit or dead, and that his mother and
sister would be better off without him. Those ladies were again from
home, and the fact did not make it easier to dissociate such sayings
from an unhealthy horror of loaded revolvers.

So you may think what I felt the very next evening--which I did insist
on spending at No. 7--when the distasteful conversation was renewed and
developed to the point of outrage. Daylight and less fog had failed to
reveal any trace whatever of the thieves, and it became evident that the
colonel's moral victory (he had lost a few spoons) was also a
regrettably bloodless one. I saw no more of him during a day of vain
excitement, but at night his card was brought up to Uvo's room, and the
old fellow followed like a new pin.

I was in those days none too nice about my clothes, and both of us young
fellows were more or less as we had been all day; but the sight of the
dapper coach in his well-cut dinner jacket, with shirt-front shining
like his venerable pate, and studded with a couple of good pearls, might
well have put us to the blush. Under his arm he carried a big cigar-box,
and this he presented to Delavoye with a courtly sparkle.

"You rushed to our aid last night, Mr. Delavoye, and we nearly shot you
for your pains!" said the colonel. "Pray accept a souvenir which in your
hands, I hope, and in similar circumstances, is less likely to end in so
much smoke."

Uvo lifted the lid and the gas-light flashed from the plated parts of a
six-chambered revolver with a six-inch barrel. It was one of the deadly
brace that we had seen on the colonel's chimneypiece in the middle of
the night.

"I can't take it from you," said Delavoye, shrinking palpably from the
pistol. "I really am most grateful to you, Colonel Cheffins, but I've
done nothing to deserve such a handsome gift."

"I beg to differ," said the colonel, "and I shall be sorely hurt if you
refuse it. You never know when your turn may come; after your own
account of that plate-chest, I shan't lie easy in my bed until I feel
you are properly prepared against the worst."

"But my poor mother would rather lose every salt-cellar, Colonel
Cheffi