ine."

"But I thought your case was an accident pure and simple?"

"On my part, certainly; but how do I know he couldn't get more power over
me in my sleep than at any other time? He saw me walking in my sleep with
this wretched revolver. He said himself I'd given him the chance of a
lifetime. You may be sure he meant before that poor man's death, not
after it."

"It isn't possible," declared Phillida, as though she had laid hold of one
solid certainty in a sea of floating hypotheses. "And I know he hasn't a
pistol of his own," she added, lest he should simplify his charge.

But there they were agreed.

"He hadn't one on him that morning; that I can swear," said Pocket,
impartially disposing of the idea. "Mine was the only one in that cape of
his, because I once jolly nearly had it out again when he came back into
the room. There was nothing of the sort in his other coat, or anywhere
else about him, or I couldn't have helped seeing it." Phillida accepted
this statement only too thankfully. She beamed on the boy, as if in
recognition of a piece of downright magnanimity towards an enemy whom she
could now understand his regarding in that light. If only he would go
before the enemy returned! If her uncle had such a power over him as he
himself seemed to feel, then that was all the more reason for him to go
quickly. But Pocket was not the man to get up and run like that. Perhaps
he enjoyed displaying his bravery on the point, and keeping his companion
on tenter-hooks on his account; at any rate he insisted on finishing his
breakfast, and gave further free expression to the wildest surmises as he
did so. And yet he was even then on the brink of a discovery which was
some excuse for the wildest of them all, while it demanded a fresh
solution of the whole affair.

He had been fingering the recovered weapon in his pocket, almost fondling
it, though with mingled feelings, as the Prodigal Son of his small
possessions; suddenly it leapt out like a live thing in his hand, and
clattered on the table between the girl and boy. It was a wonder neither
of them was shot dead in his excitement. His whole face was altered; but
so was his whole life. She could not understand his incoherent outburst;
she only knew that he was twisting the chambers round and round under her
nose, and that there appeared to be live cartridges in all six.

"Don't you see?" the words came pouring. "Not one of them's been
fired--it's as I