I told him how I had got in at the second-floor window, without concealing a word of the truth. The gravity of the situation, and the sharpness of the doctor’s intellects, as expressed in his eyes, made anything like a suppression of facts on my part a desperately dangerous experiment. “You wanted to see what I was about up here, did you?” said he, when I had ended my confession. “Do you know?” The pistol barrel touched my cheek as he said the last words. I thought of all the suspicious objects scattered about the room, of the probability that he was only putting this question to try my courage, of the very likely chance that he would shoot me forthwith, if I began to prevaricate. I thought of these things, and boldly answered: “Yes, I do know.” He looked at me reflectively; then said, in low, thoughtful tones, speaking, not to me, but entirely to himself: “Suppose I shoot him?” I saw in his eye, that if I flinched, he would draw the trigger. “Suppose you trust me?” I said, without moving a muscle. “I trusted you, as an honest man, downstairs, and I find you, like a thief, up here,” returned the doctor, with a self-satisfied smile at the neatness of his own retort. “No,” he continued, relapsing into soliloquy: “there is risk every way; but the least risk perhaps is to shoot him.” “Wrong,” said I. “There are relations of mine who have a pecuniary interest in my life. I am the main condition of a contingent reversion in their favor. If I am missed, I shall be inquired after.” I have wondered since at my own coolness in the face of the doctor’s pistol; but my life depended on my keeping my self-possession, and the desperate nature of the situation lent me a desperate courage. “How do I know you are not lying?” he asked. “Have I not spoken the truth, hitherto?” Those words made him hesitate. He lowered the pistol slowly to his side. I began to breathe freely. “Trust me,” I repeated. “If you don’t believe I would hold my tongue about what I have seen here, for your sake, you may be certain that I would for--” “For my daughter’s,” he interposed, with a sarcastic smile. I bowed with all imaginable cordiality. The doctor waved his pistol in the air contemptuously. “There are two ways of making you hold your tongue,” he said. “The first is shooting you; the second is making a felon of you. On consideration, after what you have said, the risk in either case seems about equal. I am naturally a humane man; your family have done me no injury; I will not be the cause of their losing money; I won’t take your life, I’ll have your character. We are all felons on this floor of the house. You have come among us--you shall be one of us. Ring that bell.” He pointed with the pistol to a bell-handle behind me. I pulled it in silence.