d that it was composed of
half-crowns. I had closed the paper again, and was just raising my head
from the table over which it had been bent, when my right cheek came
in contact with something hard and cold. I started back--looked up--and
confronted Doctor Dulcifer, holding a pistol at my right temple.

CHAPTER IX.

THE doctor (like me) had his shoes off. The doctor (like me) had come
in without making the least noise. He cocked the pistol without saying a
word. I felt that I was probably standing face to face with death, and
I too said not a word. We two Rogues looked each other steadily and
silently in the face--he, the mighty and prosperous villain, with my
life in his hands: I, the abject and poor scamp, waiting his mercy.

It must have been at least a minute after I heard the click of the
cocked pistol before he spoke.

"How did you get here?" he asked.

The quiet commonplace terms in which he put his question, and the
perfect composure and politeness of his manner, reminded me a little of
Gentleman Jones. But the doctor was much the more respectable-looking
man of the two; his baldness was more intellectual and benevolent; there
was a delicacy and propriety in the pulpiness of his fat white chin, a
bland bagginess in his unwhiskered cheeks, a reverent roughness about
his eyebrows and a fullness in his lower eyelids, which raised him far
higher, physiognomically speaking, in the social scale, than my old
prison acquaintance. Put a shovel-hat on Gentleman Jones, and the effect
would only have been eccentric; put the same covering on the head of
Doctor Dulcifer, and the effect would have been strictly episcopal.

"How did you get here?" he repeated, still without showing the least
irritation.

I told him how I had got in at the second-floor window, without
concealing a word of the truth. The gravity of the situation, and the
sharpness of the doctor's intellects, as expressed in his eyes, made
anything like a suppression of facts on my part a desperately dangerous
experiment.

"You wanted to see what I was about up here, did you?" said he, when I
had ended my confession. "Do you know?"

The pistol barrel touched my cheek as he said the last words. I
thought of all the suspicious objects scattered about the room, of the
probability that he was only putting this question to try my courage, of
the very likely chance that he would shoot me forthwith, if I began to
prevaricate. I thought of these things, a