would be cold-blooded desecration; and public opinion has still to be
educated up to psychical vivisection! I have myself tried in vain to
initiate such education. I have applied for perfectly private admission
to hospital deathbeds, even to the execution-shed in prisons. My
applications have been peremptorily refused."

Pocket's thoughts went off at a gruesome tangent.

"You could see a man hanged!" he shuddered, and himself saw the little old
effigy on the model drop in Marylebone Road.

"Why not?" asked the other in wide wonder. "But as I am not allowed," he
continued in lighter key, "I have to do the best I can. If I cannot be in
at the death, I may still by luck be in at a dream or two! And now you
may guess why I wander with my camera where men come in to sleep in broad
daylight. I prowl among them; a word awakens them; and then I take my
chance."

"They're not all like that man this morning, then," remarked Pocket,
looking back on the inanimate clod reclining in the dew.

The doctor deliberated with half-shut eyes that seemed to burn the
brighter for their partial eclipse.

"This morning," he rejoined, "was like no other. I owe you some
confidence in the matter. I had the chance of a lifetime this
morning--thanks to you!"

"Thanks to me?" repeated Pocket. A flash enlightened him. "Do you mean
to say I--you took me--walking----?"

"You shall see my meaning," replied Baumgartner, rising. "Wait one
minute."

He was not gone longer. Pocket heard him on the other side of double
doors in an alcove; but he had gone out into the passage to get there.
Running water and the chink of porcelain were specially audible in his
absence, but the boy was thinking of another sound. The doctor before
leaving had discarded a black alpaca jacket, light as a pocket
handkerchief, which had fallen so softly as to recall by contrast the
noise made by the revolver in the pocket of the cloak. The lad was
promptly seized with a strong desire to recover his property; he was
within an ace of doing so, the cloak containing it being actually in his
hands and only dropped as Baumgartner returned to announce that all was
ready.

Sharp to the left, at the end of the passage, was a door which would
simply have been a second way into the drawing-room had the double doors
within been in use; these being shut, the space behind made a separate
chamber which again reminded the schoolboy of his study, that smallest of
small roo