st sight of Bunning that something had happened. The
man seemed dazed, he dragged his great legs slowly after him and planted
them on the floor as though he wanted something that was secure, like
a man who had begun desperately to slip down a crevasse. His back was
bowed and his cheeks were flushed as though some one had been striking
him, but his eyes told Olva everything. They were the eyes of a child
who has been wakened out of sleep and sees Terror.

"What is it? Sit down. Pull yourself together."

"Oh! Dune! . . . My God, Dune!" The man's voice had the unreality of men
walking in a cinematograph. "Craven's coming."

"Coming! Where?"

"Here!"

"Now?"

"I don't know--when. He knows."

"You told him?"

"I thought it best. I thought I was doing right. It's all gone wrong.
Oh! these last two days! what I've suffered!"

Now for the first time in the history of the whole affair Olva Dune may
be said to have felt sheer physical terror, not terror of the mist,
of the road, of the darkness, of the night, but terror of physical
things--of the loss of light and air, of the denial of food, of physical
death. . . . For a moment the room swam about him. He heard, in the
Court below him, some men laughing--a dog was barking. Then he saw that
Bunning was on the edge of hysteria. The bedmaker would come in and find
him laughing--as he had laughed once before.

Olva stilled the room with a tremendous effort--the floor sank, the
table and chairs tossed no longer.

"Now, Bunning, tell me quickly. They'll be here to lay lunch in a
minute. What have you told Craven? And why have you told him anything?"

"I told him--yesterday--that I did it."

"That _you_ did it?"

"Yes, that I murdered Carfax."

"My God! You fool! . . . You fool!"

A most dangerous thing this devotion of a fool.

But, strangely, Olva's words roused in Bunning a kind of protest, so
that he pulled his eyes back into their sockets, steadied his hands,
held his boots firmly to the floor, and, quite softly, with a little
note of urgency in it as though he were pleading before a great court,
said--

"Yes, I know. But he drove me to it; Craven did. I thought it was the
only way to save you. He's been at me now for days; ever since that time
he stopped me in Outer Court and asked me why I was a friend of yours.
He's been coming to my room--at night--at all sorts of times--and just
sitting there and looking at me."

Olva came across and touched Bunning'