"I--say! _That_ makes it the dickens, doesn't it? Well, I know what his eyes looked like, I can promise you that! Poor devil! Thank goodness you were all too busy watching Philip when he came up from down below to notice me much. Nobody noticed me except Audrey, and she----" Philip sliced his words off like a guillotine. "You haven't told her anything about this, have you?" Monty stared at him. "No," he replied, "as a matter of fact I haven't; but what if I had? I don't quite see----" "Then you see you jolly well don't," Philip curtly ordered him. "Four's quite enough. You understand?" "Four's quite enough." Do you see what was already working in his mind, and what a sudden jump forward our Case took when his lips uttered that concluding word? For he did not say "enough" for what. The What was only just dimly beginning to appear. Perhaps I shall save time if I put what I mean into the form of a single question:-- Why had Esdaile, who knew perfectly well that that pistol ought to be in the custody of the police, not himself immediately handed it over? Why indeed did he not do so now? That is what I am getting at. He had not only _not_ handed the pistol over, but he had drawn blinds and grubbed about floors and had sought high and low, though so far in vain, for a stray bullet. Nay, he might lecture Monty on the picking up of random pistols, but what else had he himself done when he had found that little empty brass case in the garden and had slipped it into his waistcoat pocket? He had pretended to hold back until Monty should have told him everything. Well, Monty had now told him everything. There was a telephone in the hall. Ten seconds would suffice. Yet Esdaile did nothing. I was conscious of a curious quickening of excitement. The whole atmosphere of our little gathering had already changed. Monty, sitting on his stool, seemed somehow less of a culprit, Esdaile something much more nearly in collusion with him. And above all it distinctly began to appear--dare I say "providential"?--that Monty had picked up that pistol. Why? Was it because Chummy Smith, instead of being a stranger who must be left to take the consequences of his own acts, was Hubbard's and Esdaile's friend? XI It is not for me to draw the hair-line that divides the heart's wish from the conviction of the rightness of the act that follows it. We are all prone to do what we want to do and to look for reasons afterwards. That was for Esdaile and Hubbard to consider. I am merely stating the Case. Personally you will always find me the broadest-minded and most tolerant of men until these lofty qualities begin to react on my own private affairs; after that I become a pattern of the narrow and the hidebound. Whether in their place I should have done as Hubbard and Esdaile did I have fortunately not to answer. What that was you will see in a moment.