“‘Why didn’t you come to meet me as I bade you?’ his voice whispered harshly. ‘Did you think now that I’ve found you, I would let you slip through my fingers again?’ Then, as his eyes fell on the collar, he closed his hand on it, saying, ‘That will be very useful to me just now; my plans aren’t working well. Forget that you found this, my girl, and if you are wise, don’t scream.’ Then ten words oozed from Annie’s lips, ‘John Scott, let go! I said I’d never meet you.’ “It was my brother,—at best, a would-be thief,—dogging my sweetheart. He was bearded when I left home, and so I did not know him. For a second my right hand was on the pistol that I always carry when at work; then I suddenly realized what it would mean to the two women I best loved if I shot my brother. If Annie would only scream, some of the gentlemen who slept in a chamber beyond the billiard room could hardly be asleep, and they would come. But how to make her? “Dr. Russell, there’s something works in us besides ourselves at times. Yes, I see you know it, too. Scarce knowing what I did, I turned my bull’s-eye straight and full on Annie; with one hand reaching for the trap, I shook those fool rats loose, and they, half blinded, ran down the light streak toward her. Next thing I knew, she was up on a chair, and shriek upon shriek rang through the house. Before I could scarce move, the room was full of the gentlemen, Mr. —— and the artist being in the lead. The man, bewildered by the suddenness of it all, loosed his hold on the jewels, and vanished through the pantry, as if he dived into water, but quick as he went, they both knew that I had seen. “Before either of us could offer a word of explanation, my employer took in the whole matter at a glance, as he thought, recognized Annie as the maid of one of his guests, and, laying the uproar only to the rats and me, laughed at it as a great joke, while the artist fellow, seeing Annie, who kept on screaming and was too frightened to get down from the chair, called,—‘By Jove! What a picture! Stay there just for a minute while I make a memory sketch,’—at least, I think that’s what he called it. * * * * * “Well, sir, we were married New Year’s Eve, and neither of us have since ever put in _words_ what we saw and heard that night, just before I loosed the rats. “A year after, I was overlooking some work in a picture gallery, when I came face to face with the picture as it’s there now, and I knew I’d have to buy it first or last, sir, even if it bit a hole in my savings, for even a rat-catcher, as I was then, if he had a good mother of his own, doesn’t want his wife, with no shoes and her petticoats up to her knees, to be seen outside his own home.