“That’s a trifle better. Anyhow, I didn’t see him, though I can’t say honestly that my ride was a pleasant one. I’d been staying here with old Crofton, just before he sold the place to your uncle, and I had business too to transact with Thorpe of Thorpe Hill. As luck would have it, all the carriages here were in use but this one. It wasn’t in the state it is now, but it was out of date and uncomfortable even then. However, it took me there all right. It was on the way back that I had my adventure. “I had barely composed myself to sleep with the consciousness of having dined too well—Thorpe never stinted his guests—when I was roused by an uneasy feeling that I was not the sole occupant of the carriage. The interior was lit up by a weird, fantastic light that came and went, rose and fell, like the glow that throbs over a brick-kiln or a blast furnace. After all, it may have been only the reflection of my own cigar which I had instinctively kept alight during my short nap. From out the border-land which separates sleep from waking, I saw two figures on the opposite seat. For a time I studied them with hardly more interest than I should the figures in a pantomime, till it was forced upon me by their wild gesticulation that this was no pantomime enacting for my benefit, but a veritable tragedy of life and death. The one figure shrank cowering in a corner of the carriage; the other stood over it with uplifted hand. But no voice or sound proceeded from them. Only on the hand of one, the figure that crouched and trembled, I recognised the famous Thorpe emerald—as the family lawyer I knew it well—while the other that stormed and threatened might have passed for old Crofton himself, in so far as youth of twenty can anticipate the form and lineaments of seventy-five. “The details had hardly had time to shape themselves within my brain, when the light died out. I heard—or fancied I heard—a short, sharp gasp, an inarticulate cry for mercy, and the carriage drew up before the gate of Broadwater.” That night after dinner we were subjected to a close cross-examination by our uncle. “The boys have told me your surprising story, Mr. Roberts. May I ask how it is I never heard it from you before?” “Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heyward, you wouldn’t have heard it now if my little friend Ronald hadn’t rushed me into telling it by his burst of eagerness. You might have said I’d been dining too well—as indeed I had—and that isn’t exactly the thing to recommend a family lawyer. So you’ve got my reputation at your mercy, young gentlemen. For, of course, it _was_ the dinner—a nightmare of some kind, no doubt. Though I’m bound to say I never had a nightmare, either before or afterwards, that was half so vivid and real. It was quite the worst quarter of an hour I ever passed in my life.”