a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too.  And then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away, and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and slunk from the room and slipped away from the club.  Poor man, he scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared at you; and the headlines said:—­Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.

Yes, he saw it then:  the laughter had not stopped, some had probably burst blood vessels, some must have choked, some succumbed to nausea, heart-failure must have mercifully taken some, and they were his friends after all, and none had escaped, not I even the waiters.  It was that infernal joke.

He thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the drive to Victoria Station, the boat-train to Dover and going disguised to the boat:  and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, two constables that wished to speak for a moment with Mr. Watkyn-Jones.  That was his name.

In a third-class carriage with handcuffs on his wrists, with forced conversation when any, he returned between his captors to Victoria to be tried for murder at the High Court of Bow.

At the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerable ability who had gone into the Cabinet in order to enhance his forensic reputation.  And he was ably defended.  It is no exaggeration to say that the speech for the defence showed it to be usual, even natural and right, to give a dinner to twenty men and to slip away without ever saying a word, leaving all, with the waiters, dead.  That was the impression left in the minds of the jury.  And Mr. Watkyn-Jones felt himself practically free, with all the advantages of his awful experience, and his two jokes intact.  But lawyers are still experimenting with the new act which allows a prisoner to give evidence.  They do not like to make no use of it for fear they may be thought not to know of the act, and a lawyer who is not in touch with the very latest laws is soon regarded as not being up to date and he may drop as much as L50,000 a year in fees.  And therefore though it always hangs their clients they hardly like to neglect it.

Mr. Watkyn-Jones was put in the witness box.  There he told the simple truth, and a very poor affair it seemed after the impassioned and beautiful things that were uttered by the counsel for the defence.  Men and women had wept when they heard that.  They did not weep when they heard Watkyn-Jones.  Some tittered.  It no longer seemed a right and natural thing to leave one’s guests all dead and to fly the country.  Where was Justice, they asked, if anyone could do that?  And when his story was told the judge rather happily asked if he could make him die of laughter too.  And what was the joke?  For in so grave a place as a Court of Justice no fatal effects need be feared.  And hesitatingly the prisoner pulled from his pocket the three slips of paper:  and perceived for the first time that the one on which the first and best joke had been written had become quite blank.  Yet he could remember it, and only too clearly.  And he told it from memory to the Court.