Everything had changed, we have noted, and nothing could more have proved it than the fact that, by the same turn, sincerity of desire had dropped out of Winch’s chords, while irritation, sharp and almost imperious, had come in. “That’s because he sees I see something!” Mark said to himself; but he had no need to add that it shouldn’t prevent his seeing more--for the simple reason that, in a miraculous fashion, this was exactly what he did do in glaring out the harder. It was beyond explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of a rug, at the point where an arm-chair, pushed a little out of position, over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the strong toe-tip surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift Our gentleman, from where he hovered, and while looking straight at the master of the scene, yet saw, as by the tiny flash of a reflection from fine metal, _under_ the chair. What he recognised, or at least guessed at, as sinister, made him for a moment turn cold, and that chill was on him while Winch again addressed him--as differently as possible from any manner yet used. “I beg of you in God’s name to talk to me--to _talk_ to me!” It had the ring of pure alarm and anguish, but was by this turn at least more human than the dazzling glitter of intelligence to which the poor man had up to now been treating him. “It’s you, my good friend, who are in deep trouble,” Mark was accordingly quick to reply, “and I ask your pardon for being so taken up with my own sorry business.” “Of course I’m in deep trouble”--with which Winch came nearer again; “but turning you on was exactly what I wanted.” Mark Monteith, at this, couldn’t, for all his rising dismay, but laugh out; his sense of the ridiculous so swallowed up, for that brief convulsion, his sense of the sinister. Of such conivence in pain, it seemed, was the fact of another’s pain, and of so much worth again disinterested sympathy! “Your interest was then----?” “My interest was in your being interesting. For you _are!_ And my nerves--!” said Newton Winch with a face from which the mystifying smile had vanished, yet in which distinction, as Mark so persistently appreciated it, still sat in the midst of ravage. Mark wondered and wondered--he made strange things out. “Your nerves have needed company.” He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly before he had felt Winch’s own pressure of possession and detention. “As good for you yourself, that--or still better,” he went on--“than I and my grievance were to have found you. Talk to we, talk to we, Newton Winch!” he added with an immense inspiration of charity.