“Do you know what you did?” the man demanded in the end. The question seemed an odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to be reproduced phonetically, corresponded with the peculiarity of tense, reminding Pocket of the music-masters at his school. It was less easy to account for the tone employed, which was low in pitch and tremulous with passion. And the man stood tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an iron jaw, and a weird cloak and hat that helped to invest him with the goblin dignity of a Spanish inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel in quivering flesh. “I must have been walking in my sleep,” began Pocket, shakily; further explanations were cut very short. “Sleep!” echoed the other, in bitter unbelief. Pocket felt his prime quality impugned. “Well? I can’t help it! I’ve done it before to-day; you needn’t believe me if you don’t like! Do you mind letting go of my hand?” “With that in it!” The scornful tone made the boy look down, and there was the pistol he had strapped to his wrist, not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but his finger actually on the trigger. “You don’t mean to say I let it off?” cried Pocket, horrified. “Feel the barrel.” The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched it with his left hand. The barrel was still warm. “It was in my sleep,” protested Pocket, in a wheezy murmur. “I’m glad to hear it.” “I tell you it was!” The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but shut them on a second impulse. The daggers in his eyes probed deeper into those of the boy, picking his brains, transfixing the secrets of his soul. No master’s eye had ever delved so deep into his life; he felt as though the very worst of him at school was known in an instant to this dreadful stranger in the wilds of London. He writhed under the ordeal of that protracted scrutiny. He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist. His captor was meanwhile fumbling with a penknife in his unoccupied hand. A blade was slowly opened; the leather watch-guard was sliced through in a second; the revolver dropped harmlessly into the dew. The man swooped down and whipped it through the railings with a snarl of satisfaction. “And now,” said he, releasing Pocket, but standing by with his weapon, “I suppose you know that, apart from everything else, you had no right to spend the night in here at all?” The boy, already suffering from his humiliating exertions, gasped out, “I’m not the only one!” He had just espied a recumbent figure through the palings; it was that of a dilapidated creature lying prone, a battered hat beside him, on the open grass beyond the path. The tall man merely redoubled his scrutiny of the face in front of, him, without so much as a glance behind. “That,” said he, “is the sort that staggers in as soon as the gates are open, and spends the day sleeping itself sober. But you are not that sort at all, and you have spent the night here contrary to the rules. Who are you, and what’s the matter with you?”