nd boldly answered:

"Yes, I do know."

He looked at me reflectively; then said, in low, thoughtful tones,
speaking, not to me, but entirely to himself:

"Suppose I shoot him?"

I saw in his eye, that if I flinched, he would draw the trigger.

"Suppose you trust me?" I said, without moving a muscle.

"I trusted you, as an honest man, downstairs, and I find you, like a
thief, up here," returned the doctor, with a self-satisfied smile at
the neatness of his own retort. "No," he continued, relapsing into
soliloquy: "there is risk every way; but the least risk perhaps is to
shoot him."

"Wrong," said I. "There are relations of mine who have a pecuniary
interest in my life. I am the main condition of a contingent reversion
in their favor. If I am missed, I shall be inquired after." I have
wondered since at my own coolness in the face of the doctor's pistol;
but my life depended on my keeping my self-possession, and the desperate
nature of the situation lent me a desperate courage.

"How do I know you are not lying?" he asked.

"Have I not spoken the truth, hitherto?"

Those words made him hesitate. He lowered the pistol slowly to his side.
I began to breathe freely.

"Trust me," I repeated. "If you don't believe I would hold my tongue
about what I have seen here, for your sake, you may be certain that I
would for--"

"For my daughter's," he interposed, with a sarcastic smile.

I bowed with all imaginable cordiality. The doctor waved his pistol in
the air contemptuously.

"There are two ways of making you hold your tongue," he said. "The first
is shooting you; the second is making a felon of you. On consideration,
after what you have said, the risk in either case seems about equal. I
am naturally a humane man; your family have done me no injury; I will
not be the cause of their losing money; I won't take your life, I'll
have your character. We are all felons on this floor of the house. You
have come among us--you shall be one of us. Ring that bell."

He pointed with the pistol to a bell-handle behind me. I pulled it in
silence.

Felon! The word has an ugly sound--a very ugly sound. But, considering
how near the black curtain had been to falling over the adventurous
drama of my life, had I any right to complain of the prolongation of the
scene, however darkly it might look at first? Besides, some of the best
feelings of our common nature (putting out of all question the value
which men so unaccountably per