d Peter
thoughtfully. "But I didn't think of that at the time."

He swallowed his water quickly and it went the wrong way and added to
his confusion. It also began to dawn upon him that he might be called to
account. Let it be said at once that he wasn't. He had taken too
prominent a part.

Meantime, Mrs. Wimp was bathing Mr. Wimp's eye, and rubbing him
generally with arnica. Wimp's melodrama had been, indeed, a sight for
the gods. Only, virtue was vanquished and vice triumphant. The villain
had escaped, and without striking a blow.

CHAPTER X.

There was matter and to spare for the papers the next day. The striking
ceremony--Mr. Gladstone's speech--the sensational arrest--these would of
themselves have made excellent themes for reports and leaders. But the
personality of the man arrested, and the Big Bow Mystery Battle--as it
came to be called--gave additional piquancy to the paragraphs and the
posters. The behavior of Mortlake put the last touch to the
picturesqueness of the position. He left the hall when the lights went
out, and walked unnoticed and unmolested through pleiads of policemen to
the nearest police station, where the superintendent was almost too
excited to take any notice of his demand to be arrested. But to do him
justice, the official yielded as soon as he understood the situation. It
seems inconceivable that he did not violate some red-tape regulation in
so doing. To some this self-surrender was limpid proof of innocence; to
others it was the damning token of despairing guilt.

The morning papers were pleasant reading for Grodman, who chuckled as
continuously over his morning egg, as if he had laid it. Jane was
alarmed for the sanity of her saturnine master. As her husband would
have said, Grodman's grins were not Beautiful. But he made no effort to
suppress them. Not only had Wimp perpetrated a grotesque blunder, but
the journalists to a man were down on his great sensation tableau,
though their denunciations did not appear in the dramatic columns. The
Liberal papers said that he had endangered Mr. Gladstone's life; the
Conservative that he had unloosed the raging elements of Bow
blackguardism, and set in motion forces which might have easily swelled
to a riot, involving severe destruction of property. But "Tom Mortlake,"
was, after all, the thought swamping every other. It was, in a sense, a
triumph for the man.

But Wimp's turn came when Mortlake, who reserved his defense, was
brou