The lunatic--for he was little else--had all but given up the knife, but of course now changed his mind. "_You're_ answerin' for him, I see!" he exclaimed, with so sane a voice it was hard to think him delirious. "I can see round some of yer better than you think. Yes--Muster Preedy! Ah!... would you ... would you?..." This with an expression of intense cunning, with the knife held behind him; and a dangerous tendency to edge back towards the woman, all the while watching the Rev. Athelstan with a sly, ugly half-grin. As he got nearer to the woman, she became unable to control herself--little wonder, perhaps!--and broke out hysterically: "Oh, God ha' mercy!--stop him! stop him!--Oh, Lard!--oh, Christ!..." and so on. It was time to act, and Athelstan Taylor knew it. Delay might be fatal. Guided by some instinct he could not explain, he shouted with sudden decision: "They're here, you fool! Can't you hear them?" and then, seizing on the pause in which the maniac's attention--caught also for the moment, perhaps, by railway sounds without--wandered to this mysterious "they," sprang upon him, and by great good luck pinioned his knife-hand as both rolled together on the carpetless floor. "Thank heaven it's me, not Gus!" thought he again, as he and his antagonist pitched heavily on the ground. He could feel the great strength there was still in the miserable victim of the fiend Alcohol. Often patients with this disorder will need three or four men to hold them--indeed, sometimes develope abnormal muscular strength, even while its tremors are running riot through their whole system. But Mr. Steptoe's strength would have been abnormally developed indeed to enable him to contend against the successful competitor in a hundred athletic contests in the old 'Varsity days. A few sharp struggles, and he lay powerless, his adversary kneeling over him, grasping his two wrists, while he cursed and muttered below, before the railway sounds, connected apparently with the stopping of an almost endless luggage-train, had subsided into mere clinks that seemed to soothe it to stillness. But the knife was still in his right hand. "Now where's that little maid?" Our little Lizarann had never run away, as some children might have done, but had held on bravely through the whole of the terrifying scene, full of admiration for this new Policeman--she almost thought he was really one; and when she heard him ask for her, she found voice to reply, not very articulately. She was there, please!--blue with the cold and her teeth chattering. Aunt Stingy was g-goed away. So much the better, the new Policeman seemed to think. He continued: "Very well, my child!--now you can be useful.... No, don't call your aunty. We'll do without her; she's no use. You do just as I tell you--just exactly!" Lizarann nodded her alacrity to obey orders. "Me?--yass!" is her brief undertaking.