ad admitted his visitor, his presence of mind coming back to
it and suggesting that he couldn't pick it up without making it more
conspicuous, he had thought, by some swing of the foot or other casual
manoeuvre, to dissimulate its visibility.

They were at close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly
passive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with
the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an
extraordinary general tremor. To Mark's challenge he opposed afresh a
brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was
that of a gaping wound. "Well, you needn't take _that_ trouble. You see
I'm such another."

"Such another as Phil-----?"

He didn't blink. "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'm worse."

"Do you mean you're guilty-----?"

"I mean I shall be wanted. Only I've stayed to take it."

Mark threw back his head, but only tightened his hands. He inexpressibly
understood, and nothing in life had ever been so strange and dreadful to
him as his thus helping himself by a longer and straighter stretch,
as it were, to the monstrous sense of his friend's "education." It had
been, in its immeasurable action, the education of business, of which
the fruits were all around them. Yet prodigious was the interest, for
prodigious truly--it seemed to loom before Mark--must have been the
system. "To 'take' it?" he echoed; and then, though faltering a little,
"To take what?"

He had scarce spoken when a long sharp sound shrilled in from the outer
door, seeming of so high and peremptory a pitch that with the start it
gave him his grasp of his host's shoulders relaxed an instant, though to
the effect of no movement in _them_ but what came from just a sensibly
intenser vibration of the whole man. "For _that_!" said Newton Winch.

"Then you've known-----?"

"I've expected. You've helped me to wait." And then as Mark gave an
ironic wail: "You've tided me over. My condition has _wanted_ somebody
or something. Therefore, to complete this service, will you be so good
as to open the door?"

Deep in the eyes Mark looked him, and still to the detection of no
glimmer of the earlier man in the depths. The earlier man had been what
he invidiously remembered--yet would _he_ had been the whole simpler
story! Then he moved his own eyes straight to the chair under which
the revolver lay and which was but a couple of yards away. He felt his
companion take this consciousn