"Then he tossed for first shot, and made me call, and I won. So he sat down in his chair and finished his drink, and told me to blaze across at him from where I sat in the other chair. I tried to get out of it, partly because I seemed to have seen more good in Minchin in those last ten minutes than in all the months that I had known him; he might be a brute, but he was a British brute, and all right about fair play. Besides, for the moment, it was difficult to believe he was serious, or even very angry. But I, on my side, was more in a dream than not, or he would not have managed me as he did. He broke out again, cursed me and his wife, and swore that he would shoot her too if I didn't go through with it. You can't think of the things he was saying when--but I believe he said them on purpose to make me. Anyhow I pulled at last, but there was only a click, and he answered with another like lightning. That showed me how he meant it, plainer than anything else. It was too late to get out. I set my teeth and pulled again ..." "Like the clash of swords," whispered Langholm, in the pause. Severino moved his head from side to side upon the pillow. "No, not that time, Langholm. There was such a report as might have roused the neighborhood--you would have thought--but I forgot to tell you he had shut the window and run up some shutters, and even drawn the curtains, to do for the other houses what the double doors did for his own. When the smoke lifted, he was lying back in his chair as though he had fallen asleep ... "I think the worst was waiting for her to come down. I opened both doors, but she never came. Then I shut them very quietly--and utterly lost my head. You know what I did. I don't remember doing half. It was the stupid cunning of a real madman, the broken window, and the things up the chimney. I got back as I had come, in the way that struck you as possible when you were there, and I woke my landlady getting in. I believe I told her everything on the spot, and that it was the last sense I spoke for weeks; she nursed me day and night that I might never tell anybody else." So the story ended, and with it, as might have been expected, the unnatural strength which had sustained the teller till the last; he had used up every ounce of it, and he lay exhausted and collapsed. Langholm became uneasy. Severino could not swallow the champagne which Langholm poured into his mouth. Langholm fetched the candle in high alarm--higher yet at what it revealed. Severino was struggling to raise himself, a deadly leaden light upon his face. "Raise me up--raise me up." Langholm raised him in his arms. "Another--hemorrhage!" said Severino, in a gasping whisper. And his blood dripped with the words. Langholm propped him up and rushed out shouting for Brunton--for Mrs. Brunton--for anybody in the house. Both were in, and the woman came up bravely without a word. "I'll go for the doctor myself," said Langholm. "I shall be quickest."