lly. "It would have been
dragged out of you all the same. I told you so yesterday, and you agreed
with me. I put it most plainly to you as a case of then or never so far
as owning up was concerned. You made your own bed with your eyes open, and
I left you last night under the impression that you were going to lie on
it like a man."

"Then why did you lock me in?" cried Pocket, pouncing on the one point on
which he did not already feel grievously in the wrong. The doctor
flattered him with a slight delay before replying.

"There were so many reasons," he said, with a sigh; "you mustn't forget
that you walk in your sleep, for one of them. We might have had you
falling downstairs in the middle of the night; but I own that I was more
prepared for the kind of relapse which appears to have overtaken you. I
was afraid you had more on your soul than you could keep to yourself
without my assistance, and that you would get brooding over what has
happened until it drove you to make a clean breast of the whole thing. I
tell you it's no good brooding or looking back; take one more look ahead,
and what do you see if you have your way? Humiliating notoriety for
yourself, calamitous consequences in your own family, certain punishment
for me!"

"The consequences at home," groaned Pocket, "will be bad enough whatever
we do. I can't bear to think of them! If only they had taken Bompas's
advice, and sent me round the world in the _Seringapatam_! I should have
been at sea by this time, and out of harm's way for the next three
months."

"The _Seringapatam?_" repeated the doctor. "I never heard of her."

"You wouldn't; she's only a sailing vessel, but she carries passengers and
a doctor, a friend of Dr. Bompas's, who wanted to send me with him for a
voyage round the world. But my people wouldn't let me go. She sails this
very day, and touches nowhere till she gets to Melbourne. If I could only
raise the passage-money, or even stow away on board, I could go out in her
still, and that would be the last of me for years and years!"

It was not the last of him in his own mind; suddenly as the thought had
come, and mad as it was, it flashed into the far future in the boy's
brain; and he saw himself making his fortune in a far land, turning it up
in a single nugget, and coming home to tell of his adventures, bearded
like the pard, another "dead man come to life," after about as many years
as the dream took seconds to fashion. An