I looked and saw a short slit across my breast just above the heart. As I put my hand up, a sovereign, and then another, rolled clinking on to the pavement. Tom picked them up, and handing them to me, remarked-- "Jasper, you may thank Heaven to-day, if you are in a mood for it. You have had a narrow escape." "What do you mean?" "Why, that you would be a dead man now had you not carried that piece of metal in your breast-pocket. Let me see it for a moment." We looked at it together, and there surely enough, almost in the centre of the clasp, was a deep dent. We were silent for a minute or so, and then Tom said-- "Let us get home. It would not do for us to be seen with this money about us." We crossed the Strand, and turned off it to the door of our lodgings. There I stopped. "Tom, I am not coming in. I shall take a long walk and a bathe to get this fearful night out of my head. You can take the money upstairs, and put it away somewhere in hiding. Stay, I will keep a coin or two. Take the rest with you." Tom looked up at the gleam of sunshine that touched the chimney-pots above, and decided. "Well, for my part, I am going to bed; and so will you if you are wise." "No. I will be back this evening, so let the fatted calf be prepared. I must get out of this for a while." "Where are you going?" "Oh, anywhere. I don't care. Up the river, perhaps." "You don't wish me to go with you?" "No, I had rather be alone. Tom, I have been a fool. I led you into a hole whence nothing but a marvellous chance has delivered us, and I owe you an apology. And--Tom, I also owe you my life." "Not to me, Jasper; to the Clasp." "To you," I insisted. "Tom, I have been a thoughtless fool, and-- Tom, that was a splendid blow of yours." He laughed, and ran upstairs, while I turned and gloomily sauntered down the deserted street. CHAPTER III. TELLS AN OLD STORY IN THE TRADITIONAL MANNER. When Tom asked me where I was going, I had suggested an excursion up the river; though, to tell the truth, this answer had come with the question. Be that as it may, the afternoon of that same Sunday found me on the left bank of the Thames between Streatley and Pangbourne; found me, with my boat moored idly by, stretched on my back amid the undergrowth, and easefully staring upward through a trellis-work of branches into the heavens. I had been lying there a full hour wondering vaguely of my last night's adventure, listening to the spring-time chorus of the birds, lazily and listlessly watching a bough that bent and waved its fan of foliage across my face, or the twinkle of the tireless kingfisher flashing down-stream in loops of light, when a blackbird lit on a branch hard by my left hand, and, all unconscious of an audience, began to pour forth his rapture to the day.