ng for you after all
we've been through together? And I, oh! there's nothing I wouldn't do if
only you'd come with me now this minute! I know there's a train about
ten, and I know where we could borrow the money on the way. Come,
Phillida, get on your things and come away from all this horror!"

He had gone on, even into details, encouraged by the tolerance or apathy
which had allowed him to go on at all. He took it for indecision; but,
whatever it was, she shook it off and declared once for all that she would
never leave Dr. Baumgartner, even if everything was true about him, and he
as mad as that would make him out.

"But he is!" cried Pocket, with most eager conviction. "That's the only
possible explanation, and you'd believe it fast enough if you'd heard all
he said to me that first night, and been with me in the dark-room when he
developed his negative of the man he said I shot! You'd see how it all
fits in, and how this other negative this morning simply shows he was at
the bottom of that other affair as well! Of course he's mad; but that's
the very reason why I can't go and leave you with him."

"He would be as he's always been to me."

"I believe he would," said honest Pocket.

"Then why don't you go away and leave us?"

"Because I can't."

"Because you won't!"

"Very well, because I won't and never will! But, mind you, it'll be your
fault if anything happens to either of us after this!"

He only meant it as a last argument, though he did resent her fatal
obstinacy, and all the obligations which it imposed upon himself. He
stood chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the stake, but he
was prepared to stand there like a man, and he did not deserve the things
she said to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. He might be a
baby, but he was not a complete coward, or simply trying to make her
miserable, as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he thinking
only of himself. But Phillida seemed suddenly to realise that, for she
broke off with a despairing little cry, and ran sobbing up the stairs.

A THIRD CASE

In days to come, when the boy had schooled himself not to speak of these
days, nor to let his mind dwell on their mystery and terror, it was as a
day of dark hours and vivid moments that he remembered the one which
Phillida and he began alone together in her uncle's house. Those endless
hours were either mercifully forgotten or else contracted to an end