After arranging to fetch him at a given hour, I left him to his trance of rest. He told me no more of his story. I had hardly expected he would; yet I retreated in an itch of half-injured excitement. Ah! if I could have foreseen under what circumstances the revelation was to come to me, I would have sworn a compact of eternal silence with him, and baffled Fate. That morning Harry returned from Yokestone, and I walked a mile to meet him. He was near as excited as I over Joshua’s coming. He knew all about him, of course. We had no secrets from one another. “What does he look like?” he said. “I’ve never seen an acquitted murderer.” Joshua had shaved the gallows. He was not the rose, but he had lived near it. “I can’t say he looks like everybody else,” I said, “because he doesn’t. But his nose is in the middle of his face.” By-and-by we fell to our long-postponed discussion of the great adventure and its moral. “I’ve been thinking,” said Harry, “that perhaps after all we’ll tell Sant.” “O, you may snigger!” he said. “But supposing anything were to happen to us.” “Why, what’s going to happen to us?” “I don’t know. One can never tell.” He spoke quite sombrely. “It wouldn’t be right, would it, to carry that secret to the grave, especially----” “Especially what?” “Why, I was going to say, especially if we thought we were going to be sent there by some one on purpose to keep it.” “Look here, Harry,” I exploded; “I wish you’d speak plain, and not hint and nudge and set a fellow jumping. Who do you mean? Say out!” “Rampick, then.” I walked on, staring at the road. He had but given actuality to a rather haunting spectre of my own. “You think he’ll be wanting to shut our mouths?” I said, low. “I think--yes. He saw us go in; and--well, look here, Dick--why’s he been watching there all these years, unless out of fear that some such thing might happen? Ah, you’ve thought the same yourself, I see! It looks black against him, in my opinion, and----” “He’s half crazed. We two ought to be a match for him.” “Suppose he took us separate? He’s strong as the devil still, I tell you. I’m not afraid; but I don’t want to be tipped over a cliff, or have a stone fall on me, and mother be left to think I didn’t take care of my life for her sake.” “Very well; we’ll tell Sant, then,” I said, graciously conceding the point--with much private relief. “Then the sooner the better,” said Harry. “I’ve thought it all out since yesterday, and concluded that not to tell him would be to make him out less of a man than we are. Supposing anything were to happen to us, and some chance brought to his knowing after all what we’d died to keep from him. A pretty opinion he’d think we had of him, and a pretty ghost to haunt his conscience, to know that he might have saved us. The sooner the better, I say.” “All right. Only he won’t be back till this evening.” “No more he will. Very well; what do you say, then, to filling up the time by going _there_ again?”