Perhaps to-morrow things would take a turn for the better.... One can at least be hopeful. Even if one is not _clever_ one can be that.... From such thoughts as these it was that this unhappy hostess was roused by a sound of smashing glass, a rumpus, and a pistol shot. She stood up, she laid her hand on her heart, she said “_Oh!_” and gripped her dressing-table for support.... After a long time and when it seemed that it was now nothing more than a hubbub of voices, in which her husband’s could be distinguished clearly, she crept out very softly upon the upper landing. She perceived her cousin, Captain Douglas, looking extremely fair and frail and untrustworthy in a much too gorgeous kimono dressing-gown of embroidered Japanese silk. “I can assure you, my lord,” he was saying in a strange high-pitched deliberate voice, “on—my—word—of—honour—as—a—soldier, that I know absolutely nothing about it.” “Sure it wasn’t all imagination, my lord?” Sir Peter asked with his inevitable infelicity.... She decided to lean over the balustrading and ask very quietly and clearly: “Lord Moggeridge, please! is anything the matter?” § 6 All human beings are egotists, but there is no egotism to compare with the egotism of the very young. Bealby was so much the centre of his world that he was incapable of any interpretation of this shouting and uproar, this smashing of decanters and firing of pistol shots, except in reference to himself. He supposed it to be a Hue and Cry. He supposed that he was being hunted—hunted by a pack of great butlers hounded on by the irreparably injured Thomas. The thought of upstairs gentlefolks passed quite out of his mind. He snatched up a faked Syrian dagger that lay, in the capacity of a paper knife, on the study table, concealed himself under the chintz valance of a sofa, adjusted its rumpled skirts neatly, and awaited the issue of events. For a time events did not issue. They remained talking noisily upon the great staircase. Bealby could not hear what was said, but most of what was said appeared to be flat contradiction. “Perchance,” whispered Bealby to himself, gathering courage, “perchance we have eluded them.... A breathing space....” At last a woman’s voice mingled with the others and seemed a little to assuage them.... Then it seemed to Bealby that they were dispersing to beat the house for him. “Good-night _again_ then,” said someone. That puzzled him, but he decided it was a “blind.” He remained very, very still. He heard a clicking in the apartment—the blue parlour it was called—between the study and the dining-room. Electric light?