"Did you think that I would trust you?" cried George. "Trust _you_! You call me hard because I won't give you a corner to lie in. And if I did, you would creep out of your corner to poison me, or cut my throat. You would crawl into my room in the dead of the night and put a pillow over my face, and kneel upon it till you'd done the trick for me; and then you'd walk off with as much as you could carry, and begin the same kind of work over again with some one else. I tell you, Mr. Phil Sheldon, I will hold no intercourse with you. You've escaped hanging, but there's something that's worse than hanging, to my mind, and that is the state of a man whom nobody will trust. You've come to that; and if you had a spark of gentlemanly feeling, you'd have bought two-pennyworth of rope and hung yourself rather than come cringing to me." "Suppose I don't cringe," said the outcast, dropping the fawning tone of the mendicant for the threatening ferocity of the social wolf; "you'd better give me a trifle to keep body and soul together for the next few weeks. I'm a desperate man, George! You and I are alone up here. You are pretty sure to have ready money about you. And there's your watch; that's worth something. I didn't come here to go away empty-handed. AND I WON'T!" He sprang to his feet, and in the next moment the lawyer heard the sharp clicking noise made by the opening of a clasp-knife. "O," cried he, "that's what you want, is it!" He bent over his desk, with his eyes fixed on those other evil eyes that still retained some likeness to his own, and with his left arm raised in a boxer's defensive attitude, to guard his head, while his right hand groped for something in a drawer. It was a moment's work. Philip had seized that uplifted left arm, and was hanging on to it like a cat, with his knife between his teeth, when George clapped the muzzle of a revolver to his brow. "There are plenty of wild beasts in London besides you," he said, "and I am not such a fool as to be without the means of settling a chance visitor of your sort. Drop your knife, and march." The outcast dropped his knife submissively. He was too weak for anything more than a spasmodic violence. "Take your pistol away from my head," he whined. "Certainly, when you are outside my door." "You might give me a handful of silver, George. I haven't a week's life left in me." "All the better for society if you hadn't an hour's life in you. Be off. I'm tired of holding this revolver to your head, and I don't mean to let it go till you're off my premises." Philip saw that there was no hope. Food and shelter were all he had hoped for; but even these blessings were not for him. He backed out of the office, closely followed by George, holding the muzzle of the revolver within an inch or so of the fraternal brains. Upon the threshold only did he pause.