matter a great deal if they arrested somebody for what I did!"

The boy was no longer looking up; and his voice trembled.

"It would alter the whole thing," he mumbled significantly.

"I don't see it," returned the doctor, with grim good-nature. "The little
wonder of the English reading world has nearly unearthed another mare's
nest, as two of its readers know full well. No real harm can come of this
typical farrago. Let it lead to an arrest! There are only two living
souls who can't account for their time at that of this unfortunate
affair."

Pocket realised this; but it was put in a way that gave him goose-skin
under the clothes. He was always seeing his accident in some new light,
always encountering some new possibility, or natural consequence of his
silence, which had not occurred to him before. But he was learning to
keep his feelings under control, to set his face and his teeth against the
regular reactions of his coward conscience and his fickle will. And once
again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unintentional minor by striking a
rousing chord on the very heart-strings of the boy.

"Eight o'clock!" cried the magician, with a glance at his watch and an ear
towards the open window. "The postman's knock from door to door down
every street in town--house to house from one end of your British Islands
to the other! A certain letter is without doubt being delivered at this
very moment--eh, my poor young fellow?"

HUNTING WITH THE HOUNDS

Eugene Thrush was a regular reader of the journal on which Dr. Baumgartner
heaped heavy satire, its feats of compression, its genius for headlines,
and the delicious expediency of all its views, which enabled its editorial
column to face all ways and bow where it listed, in the universal joint of
popularity, were points of irresistible appeal to a catholic and convivial
sense of humour. He read the paper with his early cup of tea, and seldom
without a fat internal chuckle between the sheets.

That Saturday morning, however, Mr. Thrush was not only up before the
paper came, but for once he took its opinion seriously on a serious
matter. It said exactly what he wished to think about the Hyde Park
murder: that the murderer would prove to be the author of a similar crime,
committed in the previous month of March, when the Upton boy must have
been safe at school. If that were so, it was manifestly absurd to connect
the lad with a mystery which merely happened