“What an innocent young man you are, David—never heard of Pellico’s dog before, did you? Pellico’s dog that got on Edward’s nerves same as I get on his nerves, and you never knew that Edward dosed the poor brute with some of his bug-curing stuff, eh? To be sure you didn’t think I knew, nor did Edward. I don’t tell everything I know, and how I know it is my affair and none of yours, Master David Blake, but you see Edward’s not so unhandy with a little job in the poisoning line.” David’s face darkened. The incident of Pellico’s dog had occurred when he and Edward were schoolboys of fifteen. He remembered it very well, but he did not very much care being reminded of it. Every day of his life he passed the narrow turning, down which, in defiance of parental prohibitions, he and Edward used to race each other to school. Old Pellico’s dirty, evil-smelling shop still jutted out of the farther end, and the grimy door-step upon which his dog used to lie in wait for their ankles was still as grimy as ever. Sometimes it was a trouser-leg that suffered. Sometimes an ankle was nipped, and if Pellico’s dog occasionally got a kick in return, it was not more than his due. David remembered his own surprise when it first dawned upon him that Edward minded—yes, actually minded these encounters. He recalled the occasion when Edward, his face of a suspicious pallor, had denied angrily that he was afraid of any beastly dog, and then his sudden wincing confession that he did mind—that he minded horribly—not because he was afraid of being bitten—Edward explained this point very carefully—but because the dog made such a beastly row, and because Edward dreamed of him at night, only in his dreams, Pellico’s dog was rather larger than Pellico himself, and the lane was a cul-de-sac with a wall at the end of it, against which he crouched in his dream whilst the dog came nearer and nearer. “What rot,” was David’s comment, “but if I felt like that, I jolly well know I’d knock the brute on the head.” “Would you?” said Edward, and that was all that had passed. Only, when a week later Pellico’s dog was poisoned, David was filled with righteous indignation. He stormed at Edward. “You did it—you know you did it. You did it with some of that beastly bug-killing stuff that you keep knocking about.” Edward was pale, but there was an odd gleam of triumph in the eyes that met David’s. “Well, you said you’d do for him—you said it yourself. So then I just did it.” David stared at him with all a schoolboy’s crude condemnation of something that was “not the game.” “I’d have knocked him on the head under old Pellico’s nose—but poison—poison’s _beastly_.”