ow brace up and be a
man. Don't be nervous. You're feverish. You need a tonic before you
start. What'll you drink?"

Harland looked at his host in a state divided between dementia and moral
nausea. What manner of man was this American Doctor with his accursed
Parisian education?

"I am horribly thirsty," he admitted: "I will take a glass of water,
thank you."

He said this without surprise at himself, naturally and quite sincerely.
He longed for it. It was the first request of the kind he had made for
years. Randolph handed the water to him and watched him narrowly.
Harland held up the glass to the light with a connoisseur's eye, smiled
with satisfaction, and took the clear draught down at one swallow.

"Ah!" he said: "that is good. I feel better now. Now swear that you will
save me. Don't give me up. Hide me somehow. It happened in your house,
you know."

"Give yourself no concern," said the Doctor easily.

"Why, man," blazed Harland Slack, "don't you know that I've murdered
somebody? It was a woman. I've murdered that woman you keep here. I am
a murderer."

"Your Club is only two blocks off," answered the physician with
astonishing indifference; "It will do you good to walk there. Trust me.
Don't worry over it. Let me feel your hand. It's moist and soft. No
fever; that's good. When you step foot into the Club you will never
think of the affair again."

The Doctor quietly gave the criminal his hat and coat, put a cane into
his hand, and conducted him to the door.

"Go!" he said, "go directly to your Club as usual. As a physician I
order it. It is the best thing you can do."

Mutely the trembling man obeyed, and thus the two actors in this awful
evening parted; so, perhaps, criminal and accomplice are wont to part in
the extremity of great emergencies, as if nothing had happened out of
the moral order of things.

Harland Slack walked into his fashionable Club slowly. As he did so,
whether by reason of the familiar atmosphere, or the contrast to the
scene from which he had escaped, he did not stop to consider, his crime
dropped from his memory like the burden from Christian's back. He handed
his outer garments to the liveried boy, and, as was his wont, turned
towards the poker and billiard rooms. There were the usual number of
useless gambling and playing men uselessly drinking. Harland Slack was
greeted in the usual boisterous manner.

"Hilloa! What'll you take? Here, boy, bring the same old stuff to Mr.