“I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss,” he returned, “by court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware.  If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a couple of minutes, miss, not more, I’ll endeavour to explain myself as clearly as I can.”

He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and after a moment’s reflection went on.

“You see, miss, I have been handcuffed and taken into custody and brought here.  I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am.  My shooting gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such property as I have—­’tis small—­is turned this way and that till it don’t know itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am!  I don’t particular complain of that.  Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately preceding fault of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn’t gone into the vagabond way in my youth, this wouldn’t have happened.  It has happened.  Then comes the question how to meet it.”

He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment with a good-humoured look and said apologetically, “I am such a short-winded talker that I must think a bit.”  Having thought a bit, he looked up again and resumed.

“How to meet it.  Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a lawyer and had a pretty tight hold of me.  I don’t wish to rake up his ashes, but he had, what I should call if he was living, a devil of a tight hold of me.  I don’t like his trade the better for that.  If I had kept clear of his trade, I should have kept outside this place.  But that’s not what I mean.  Now, suppose I had killed him.  Suppose I really had discharged into his body any one of those pistols recently fired off that Bucket has found at my place, and dear me, might have found there any day since it has been my place.  What should I have done as soon as I was hard and fast here?  Got a lawyer.”

He stopped on hearing some one at the locks and bolts and did not resume until the door had been opened and was shut again.  For what purpose opened, I will mention presently.

“I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have often read in the newspapers), ’My client says nothing, my client reserves his defence’:  my client this, that, and t’other.  Well, ’tis not the custom of that breed to go straight, according to my opinion, or to think that other men do.  Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer.  He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more.  What would he do, whether or not?  Act as if I was—­ shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps!  But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own way—­if you’ll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to a lady?”