Life, however, seemed brightened by the sense of a task completed, and I began to think of someone else besides myself.

“I say, Doe,” I asked, “aren’t you going to tell me where you were going when you joined that knock-kneed idiot Freedham?”

“No,” announced Doe.

“But look here,” I began, and was just about to tell him that Freedham was an unwholesome creature who had mysterious fits like a demoniac, when I remembered my promise of silence:  so I went on lamely:  “You will tell me one day, won’t you?”

“No,” he repeated, feeling very firm and adamant and Napoleonic.

“But, my darling blighter, why not?”

“Because I don’t choose to.”

“Then you’re a pig.  But you might, Doe.  Out with it.  There’s nobody but me to hear you.  And I understand.”

“No.”

“Well, tell me, how did you get back so early?”

“You see,” answered Doe, cryptically, “the sun came out; and when the sun came out, I came in.”

It was a romantic sentence such as would delight this rudimentary poet.  Why he condescended to break his mighty silence even to this extent, I don’t know.  It was perhaps a boyish love of hinting at a secret which he mustn’t disclose.  An awful idea struck me.  I say it was awful because, though stirring in itself, it brought the thought that I was left out of it.

“Oh, Doe, have you—­have you a SECRET SOCIETY?”

“No.”

“Here, hang me, Doe,” I said, “you’re not only a shocking bad conversationalist, but also a little mad.  That’s your doctor’s opinion.  That’ll be a guinea, please.”

And I got up to take the lines to Fillet.

“I say, Rupert,” said Doe, blushing and looking away.

“Well?” I asked, with my hand on the door-knob.

“I say,” he stuttered, “you—­you might just mention to Radley that I dictated all the lines.  It would sort of—­I mean—­Oh, but you needn’t, if you don’t want to.”

Sec.3

That night there happened in Bramhall House one of those strange events that are best chronicled in a few cold sentences.  That night, I say, while honest men and boys slept, Mr. Fillet sat up in bed and listened.  He distinctly heard movements in his study below.  Jumping up, he slided into his carpet slippers and crept downstairs.  There was a light in his study.  He looked round the half-open door and saw the back view of a boy in pyjamas.  The whole incident is much too sinister for me to remind you frivolously that little Carpet Slippers was once again round his corner.  He began:  “Wh-what are you doing?” and the boy at once did what any properly constituted midnight visitor should do—­switched off the electric light.  When Mr. Fillet, with a heart going like a motor engine, found the switch and flooded the room with light, there was, of course, no one there.  But on his writing-table lay his cane, broken into pieces, and my own copy of the thousand lines torn into little bits.