friends.  He had been to a play in the evening which had more or less that motif; he was open to such influences.  It was like the pair of them, after the reconciliation, to set to work looking at Jack’s new toy, the pistol.  It was a brand-new sort, and the two have been interested always in guns—­I remember how I, as a youngster, was impressed when Ben and Jack bought their first shot-guns together.  Jack had got the pistol at Mellingham’s that evening, you know—­he was likely to be keen about it still, and then—­it went off.  There are plenty of other cases where a man has shot his friend by accident—­why shouldn’t poor Jack be given the benefit of the doubt?  The telephone wouldn’t work; Jack rushed out with the same idea which struck Mr. Newbold later, of getting Dr. Avery—­and fell down the shaft.

“For me there is no doubt.  I never knew him to hold malice.  He was violent sometimes, but that he could have gone about for hours with a pistol in his pocket and murder in his heart; that he could have planned Ben Armstrong’s death and carried it out deliberately—­it’s a contradiction in terms.  It’s impossible, being Jack.  You must know this—­you know your son—­you know human nature.”

The rapid resume was but an impassioned appeal.  Its answer came after a minute; to the torrent of eager words, three words: 

“Thank you, Dick.”

The absolute lack of impression on the man’s judgment was plain.

“Ah!” The clergyman sprang to his feet and stood, his eyes blazing, despairing, looking down at the bent, listless figure.  How could he let a human being suffer as this one was suffering?  Quickly his thoughts shifted their basis.  He could not affect the mind of the lawyer; might he reach now, perhaps, the soul of the man?  He knew the difficulty, for before this his belief had crossed swords with the agnosticism of his uncle, an agnosticism shared by his father, in which he had been trained, from which he had broken free only five years before.  He had faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything.  One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed, ovalled, that this man’s psychic make-up must lift him like wings into an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world.  He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to believe to most human beings were, perhaps, his every-day thoughts.  He caught a quick breath of excitement as it flashed to his brain that now, possibly, was coming the moment when he might justify his life, might help this man whom he loved, to peace.  The breath he caught was a prayer; his strong, nervous fingers trembled.  He spoke in a tone whose concentration lifted the eyes below him, that brooded, stared.