mself severely for it too. It savoured of
disloyalty to Louisa and to Luke. He stooped and picked his cigar up
and looked his brother-in-law boldly in the face.

"I wouldn't," he said, "swear either way, whether Luke had his stick
with him last night or not. I know that stick, of course. I have got
one very like it myself."

"So have I," rejoined Sir Thomas with his placid smile.

"And if that's one of the proofs on which you are going to accuse my
future son-in-law of having committed a murder, then all I can say is,
Tom, that you and I are seeing the last of one another to-day."

But Sir Thomas took this threat, as he had taken Colonel Harris's
undisguised expressions of contempt, with perfect equanimity.

"If," he said quietly, "I did accuse Luke de Mountford or any other
man of murder on such paltry grounds as that, Will, you would be
perfectly justified in turning your back on me, if for no other reason
than that I should then be an incompetent ass."

"Well, what more is there then?"

"Only this, Will. That the stick which you have so often seen in Luke
de Mountford's hand, was found this morning inside the railings of
Green Park; it bears unmistakable signs of the use to which it was put
last night."

"You mean--that it was stained----?"

How long a time elapsed between the beginning of that query and its
last words Colonel Harris could not say. The uttering of the words was
a terrible effort. They seemed to choke him ere they reached his lips.
A buzzing and singing filled his ears so that he did not hear Sir
Thomas's reply, but through a strange veil which half obscured his
vision he saw his brother-in-law's slow nod of affirmation. For the
first time in his life, the man who had fought against naked savages
in the swamps or sands of Africa, who had heard, unflinching, the news
of the death of his only son, felt himself totally unnerved. He heard
as in a dream the hum of the busy city in the street below, hansoms
and omnibuses rattling along the road, the cries of news vendors or
hawkers, the bustle of humdrum, every-day life: and through it the
ticking of his own watch in his waistcoat pocket.

He remembered afterward how strangely this had impressed him: that he
could hear the ticking of his own watch. He had never been conscious
before of such an acute sense of hearing. And yet the buzzing and
singing in his ears went on. And he was horribly, painfully conscious
of silly, trivial things--the tickin