been interested always in guns--I remember how I, as a youngster, was
impressed when Ben and Jack bought their first shot-guns together. Jack
had got the pistol at Mellingham's that evening, you know--he was likely
to be keen about it still, and then--it went off. There are plenty of
other cases where a man has shot his friend by accident--why shouldn't
poor Jack be given the benefit of the doubt? The telephone wouldn't
work; Jack rushed out with the same idea which struck Mr. Newbold later,
of getting Dr. Avery--and fell down the shaft.

"For me there is no doubt. I never knew him to hold malice. He was
violent sometimes, but that he could have gone about for hours with
a pistol in his pocket and murder in his heart; that he could have
planned Ben Armstrong's death and carried it out deliberately--it's
a contradiction in terms. It's impossible, being Jack. You must know
this--you know your son--you know human nature."

The rapid _resume_ was but an impassioned appeal. Its answer came
after a minute; to the torrent of eager words, three words:

"Thank you, Dick."

The absolute lack of impression on the man's judgment was plain.

"Ah!" The clergyman sprang to his feet and stood, his eyes blazing,
despairing, looking down at the bent, listless figure. How could he let
a human being suffer as this one was suffering? Quickly his thoughts
shifted their basis. He could not affect the mind of the lawyer; might
he reach now, perhaps, the soul of the man? He knew the difficulty,
for before this his belief had crossed swords with the agnosticism of
his uncle, an agnosticism shared by his father, in which he had been
trained, from which he had broken free only five years before. He had
faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out
with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he
remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything.
One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary
gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed,
ovalled, that this man's psychic make-up must lift him like wings into
an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world.
He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to
believe to most human beings were, perhaps, his every-day thoughts. He
caught a quick breath of excitement as it flashed to his brain that now,
possibly, was coming the moment when he might just