"In this way," he replied, sitting down on the edge of my table and giving his striped cashmere trousers a little hitch. "Say that a shot has been fired.... Philip, I take it, has been worrying about the consequences to this fellow Smith, and incidentally to Miss Merrow. Now if I'd been there to ask Rooke a few material questions I think I could have assured him that it's a thousand to one there won't be any consequences." "Why not?" "The state of the body," he replied promptly. "Rooke saw it, you say, or at any rate quite enough of it; I saw it too; and, shot or no shot, it wouldn't have taken me two minutes to get out of Rooke that there was no earthly possibility of proving that a shot caused death." "You mean there were so many other good reasons?" "Well, I'm not a doctor, but I should say at least a dozen. No wonder that fellow Westbury--ah, that's his name, not Westcott--had to make a bolt for it. Unless somebody can be produced who actually saw the shot fired there won't be the ghost of a Case, and I'm inclined to think that even then it would reduce itself to shooting with intent to kill or wound--which is a felony, of course, but not quite the same thing as murder. No, I think you can take it from me that there won't be any consequences." I pondered this for a moment. Then I saw the flaw in it. Every man to his trade. Here was the advocate speaking, his whole acute mind trained to one single end--the getting of his man off. But I myself work in a different material and saw the Case from my own angle. "One moment," I interposed. "When you say consequences you mean legal consequences? In other words he'd slip through your fingers simply because nobody actually saw him do it?" "He wouldn't even be charged. That was practically a certainty before the inquest. It's overwhelming now the other fellow's buried." "But legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences there are in the world." "Oh, I'm not speaking of moral consequences. They're quite another matter," quoth Billy.