I have seen strange sights in my somewhat adventurous life, but a stranger spectacle than this madman, this wholesale murderer, the blood of whose recent victims was surely as yet wet and warm upon his hands, pacing backwards and forwards, his face literally distorted by anguish of soul, as he cried out upon God to have pity upon the victims of his crime, I am not likely soon to see again. As he spoke, and as I stood watching him in amazement, there was a sound like the scrunching of feet on the loose gravel outside. Then a voice: "There's someone in there, I'll swear, sergeant. Didn't you hear 'em speaking? Turn your bullseye this way a moment, will you?... Ah! Would you? Lay hold of him, sergeant; he's past me. Quick--or he'll get away!" At the first hint of a sound outside, the Dumpling had turned off the gas and stepped softly, swiftly to the door. As it opened I saw the figures of the two policemen, their helmets and shoulders outlined darkly but clearly against the light which streamed from the incandescent gas-lamp in the side street, their lower limbs and feet lost in the shadow thrown by the garden wall. I was too dazzled by the sudden flashing of the bullseye to see more than that the Dumpling was making a desperate dash for liberty; but my ears told me the rest. [Illustration: "THE DUMPLING WAS MAKING A DESPERATE DASH FOR LIBERTY."] The Dumpling had got clean away, perhaps to put the fuse to the mines of which he had spoken as laid and ready, and to spring upon a startled country the surprise of his great rebellion. I heard his footsteps and the footsteps of his out-distanced, defeated pursuers die away in the distance, and then, creeping noiselessly out, I scaled the wall and made my way home to my own rooms and to bed. I had had more than enough of adventure for one night. CHAPTER XXI. THE KINDNESS--AND UNKINDNESS--OF KATE. When I awoke next morning it was with a singular feeling of depression--the reaction, I told myself, from the excitement of the last few days. Life seemed flat and at loose ends. I was in love, with small prospect of bringing my suit to a successful issue. Nor, in the matter of the Dumpling, could I persuade myself that I had any reason for self-congratulation. I had heroically set out to trap and to catch a criminal, instead of which I had been made a prisoner myself. That I was here in bed, and between the blankets, was due neither to my own skill nor to my own strength, for I had been hopelessly outwitted in the former quality, and ignominiously made to feel my own inferiority in the latter. That I was here at all, instead perhaps of lying strangled in a cellar, was due to the arrival of the police on the previous evening.