loaded it myself the other night! It can't have been this
revolver at all!"

"But you must have known whether you fired or not?"

"I tell you I was walking in my sleep till the row woke me. I'd only
heard it once before, in a room. It sounded loud enough for the open air,
though I do remember wondering I hadn't felt any kick. But I was so
dazed, and there was this beastly thing in my hand; and he took it from me
in such a rage that of course I believed I'd let it off. But now I can
see I can't have done. It wasn't my revolver and it wasn't me!"

"Yet you say yourself my uncle didn't carry one?"

"I'll swear he didn't; but there's another man in all this! There was the
man they arrested on Saturday--the man I was so keen to set free!"

The boy's laugh grated; he was beside himself with righteous joy. What
was it to him that his innocence implied another's complicity? Only too
characteristically, he saw simply the central fact from his own point of
view; but was it such an undoubted fact as he hot-headedly supposed?
There was the broken negative to confirm a certain suspicion, but that was
not enough for Phillida.

She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose in
his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. "Then my uncle might
have put in a fresh one while you were asleep."

"Why should he?"

"I don't know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other."

"I'll soon tell you if he did!" cried Pocket. "There were fourteen in the
box to start with, because I counted them, and we only shot away one at
the Knaggses' before we were cobbed. That left thirteen--six in the
revolver and seven in my pocket. There are your six, and here's one, two,
three, four--and three's seven!"

He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for her to count them for
herself, while he looked on with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He
was beginning to see what it all meant now, but still only what it meant
to him and his. He could look his people in the face again; that was the
burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure of his innocence as
though the dead man had risen to prove it.

"Very well," said Phillida, briskly; "then it's all the more reason you
should go this minute, and catch the very first train home."

And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off, she was for helping him
on with the overcoat he had brought down again with his bag; but he
followed her out slowly, and he would