r,
and I know I shouted when the magnum burst; but fortunately so did
everybody else except Delavoye and the aged croupier.

"I suppose he was the butler?" I said when we had skirted the shallow
drive, avoiding a couple of hansoms that stood there with the cabmen
snug inside.

"What! The old fogey? Not he!" cried Delavoye as we reached the road. "I
say, don't those hansoms tell us all about his pals!"

"But who was he?"

"The man himself."

"Not Sir Christopher Stainsby?"

"I'm afraid so--the old sinner!"

"But you said he was an old saint?"

"So I thought he was; my lord warden of the Nonconformist conscience, I
always heard."

"Then how do you account for it?"

"I can't. I haven't thought about it. Wait a bit!"

He stood still in the road. It was his own road. There was that hole to
fill in before morning; meanwhile the sweet night air was sweeter far
than we had left it hours ago; and the little new suburban houses
surpassed all pleasures and palaces, behind their kindly lamps, with the
clean stars watching over them and us.

"I don't want you think the worse of me," said Delavoye, slipping his
arm through mine as he led me on: "but at this particular moment I
should somehow think less of myself if I didn't tell you, after all
we've been through together, that I was really quite severely tempted to
take that lace and those diamonds!"

I knew it.

"Well," I said, with the due deliberation of my normal Northern self,
"you'd have had a sort of right to them. But that's nothing! Why, man, I
was as near as a toucher to laying yon butler dead at our feet!"

"Then we're all three in the same boat, Gillon."

"Which three?"

It was my turn to stand still, outside his house. And now there was
excitement enough in his dark face to console me for all mine.

"You, and I, and poor old Sir Christopher."

"Poor old hypocrite! Didn't I hear that his wife died a while ago?"

"Only last year. That makes it sound worse. But in reality it's an
excuse, because of course he would fall a victim all the more easily."

"A victim to what?"

"My good Gillon, don't you see that he's up to the very same games on
the very same spot as my ignoble kinsman a hundred and fifty years ago?
Blood, liquor, and ladies as before! We admit that between us even you
and I had the makings of a thief and a murderer while we were under that
haunted roof. Don't you believe in influences?"

"Not of that kind," said I heartily. "I neve