ws.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.

"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own way, perhaps
you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?"

"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
"this is what we call the survival of the fittest."

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he
sang out quite coolly:

"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs."

"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured
way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us," he said, glancing round at the
litter of the room, "we have all the illustrated papers."

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even
more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed
through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice
continuing conversationally:

"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
"there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument.
I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the
floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there
than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however,
can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were
saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that
the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public."

"Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. "I hold
that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science
can be..."

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings
with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all
philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank
deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which,
perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than