urable
minimum; but the unforgettable moments would light themselves up in his
memory without a detail missing.

There was their first encounter at the dark-room door, and Phillida
standing all but barefoot in the ruby light, with her glorious hair about
her shoulders, a picture that could never fade. Then there was the moment
of the incriminating print, which the sun wiped out even as Phillida stood
with it in her hands. That moment merged itself in the greater one of his
discovery that the revolver was fully loaded, his inspiration that neither
it nor he had done the fatal mischief in the Park. Then she was begging
him to go (she who would keep him the time before!) and he entreating her
to come with him, and neither giving way an inch, so that they quarrelled
just when they should have stuck together, and she ran away in tears, and
he stayed below in a glow of anger which dissolved his fears like snow in
May.

That was the beginning of a black hour and more. Phillida was never to be
forgiven, then; he was staying there at his peril, staying absolutely on
her account, and so far from giving him the slightest credit for it, or a
single word of encouragement, she said all sorts of things and was off
before he could answer one of them. It was not for Pocket to see the many
ironies of that moment, and not for him to recognise the tonic property of
his heroic grievance. He could only see himself at the foot of those
stairs, first gnashing his teeth and not sorry he had made her cry, then
sitting down with his eye on the front door, revolver in hand, to await
the click of the doctor's key. Another click was to answer it; and at the
point of the cocked revolver Baumgartner was to have made a clean breast
of his crimes, not only to the giant-killer at the foot of the stairs but
to the girl he meant to call to witness with her own ears.

Pocket saw himself a desperate character just then, and one not incapable
of desperate action had the climax only come at once. But he had more
than an hour of it alone at his post; he had a whole hot forenoon of
unmitigated suspense, of sickening alarms from tradesmen's carts, boys
whistling past the house as though they were not in a wicked world at all,
and then a piano-organ that redoubled his watchfulness, and spoilt some
tunes for him for ever. Once he did hear shambling feet on the very steps
outside. Once was quite enough, though it was but an advertisement for
cast-off clo