“I can’t help it!” he gasped. “I’m sorry, Luvaine--but, but----” “Well, sir! if you’ll condescend to speak, perhaps we shall be quick to share in your merriment.” It was so extremely unlikely as far as he was concerned, that the mere suggestion brought a fresh paroxysm from the delinquent. “Oh!” he cried at last--“to think of all these years of a grievance like yours--of the solemn counsels and the wise heads waggin’--and then to learn that the gashly eye of the creature that we turned from lookin’ at should ha’ been the very stone itself!” Tuke caught himself grinning again, but Luvaine, furiously red in a moment, drew up stiff in his saddle. “And you find this food for laughter?” he said, in a high voice. “A grievance, quotha!--only a grievance that hath wrought the ruin of two souls, and for me, in the prime of life, a childless and haunted old age!” “Oh, Luvaine!” said Sir David, struggling for gravity, “I didn’t mean to cheapen you, man, or to withhold my sympathy from the problematic Mrs. L., who--who ‘very imprudently married the barber’”--he added, with a shout of merriment. Tuke saw fit to put in a hasty word. “He has earned a laugh. Let it be at you or me, Captain Luvaine; for though I take no loss of the robbery, I swear the knowledge of it has ridden me like a nightmare.” The soldier waved his hand. “Bah!” he said--“the crackling of thorns!” He dismounted to tighten his saddle-girth. “David,” he said over the straps, “has had his phases of idiotcy from my first knowledge of him.” At this the culprit went into a fresh fit. “No, but,” he said, when he could recover his voice--“on your honour d’you believe the girl’s statement, Tuke?” “Why not? If I’m credulous, I’m happy; and there’s the true philosophy of life in a nutshell.” He was struggling with his own imp of merriment. The other had set it squiggling; so that he was fain to look upon all this portentous business from a new irreverent point of view. “And that Cutwater kept the jewel in his eye-hole,” persisted Sir David, “for all the world to see? And did he sacrifice the sound article to accommodate it?” “That I cannot account for. He was blind on one side before ever you saw him.” “You’ve got him to the life, I perceive. And he wore a dummy optic, no doubt, and substituted t’other, all ingeniously painted, for it when he conceived the resplendent idea?” “I confess I never thought it out! But you’ve done it masterly.” “Ain’t I? What a genius I am!--almost as good a one as Cutwater (eh, Luvaine?), that was strung up on the downs and a fortune in his head for any crow to peck at. You’d have given an eye for an eye to know that, wouldn’t you? But it needed a crazed girl to see into the creature’s methods, and bag the prize when it fell, while all the rest of us were hunting counter.” “Are you taunting me, sir? Let me tell you your jesting is ill-timed. I would have known better, at least, than to have ordered away the skull without first examining it.”