pping the
sides of the armchair. His boots stuck up in the most absurd manner,
like interrogation marks. He watched Olva's face fearfully. At last he
gasped--

"I say, Dune, you're ill. You are really--you're overdone. You ought to
see some one, you know. You ought really, you ought to go to bed." His
words came in jerks.

Olva crossed the room and stood looking down upon him.

"No, Bunning, I'm perfectly well. . . . There's nothing the matter with
me. My nerves have been a bit tried lately by this business, keeping it
all alone, and it's a great relief to me to have told you."

The fact forced itself upon Bunning's brain. At last in a husky whisper:
"You . . . killed . . . Carfax?" And then the favourite expression of
such weak souls as he: "Oh! my God! Oh! my God!"

"Now look here, don't get hysterical about it. You've got to take it
quietly as I do. You said the other day you'd do anything for me. . . .
Well, now you've got a chance of proving your devotion."

"My God! My God!" The boots feebly tapped the floor.

"I had to tell somebody. It was getting on my nerves. I suppose it gives
you a kind of horror of me. Don't mind saying so if it does."

Bunning, taking out a grimy handkerchief, wiped his forehead. He shook
his head without speaking.

Olva sat down in the chair opposite him and lit his pipe.

"I want to tell somebody all about it. You weren't really, I suppose,
the best person to tell. You're a hysterical sort of fellow and you're
easily frightened, but you happened to come in just when I was rather
worked up about it. At any rate you've got to face it now and you must
pull yourself together as well as you can. . . . Move away from the
fire, if you're hot."

Bunning shook his head.

Olva continued: "I'm going to try to put it quite plainly to you, the
Carfax part of it I mean. There are other things that have happened
since that I needn't bother you with, but I'd like you to understand why
I did it."

"Oh! my God!" said Bunning. He was trembling from head to foot and his
fat hands rattled on the woodwork of the chair and his feet rattled on
the floor.

"I met Carfax first at my private school---a little, fat dirty boy he
was then, and fat and dirty he's been ever since. I hated him, but I was
always pleasant to him. He wasn't worth being angry with. He always did
rotten things. He knew more filthy things than the other boys, and he
was a bully--a beastly bully. I think he knew that I bated