For a minute or so after my eyes first opened no word was said.  Still dizzy with my fall, I stared for a moment at the man, then at the chest, and saw that the bright objects gleaming there were my grandfather’s key and my watch-chain, at the end of which hung the Golden Clasp.  But now the clasp was fitted to its fellow and the whole buckle lay united upon the board.

Though the bonds around my arms, wrists, and ankles caused me intolerable pain, yet my first feeling was rather of abject humiliation.  To be caught thus easily, to be lying here like any rat in a gin! this was the agonising thought.  Nor was this all.  There on the chest lay the Golden Clasp united at last—­the work completed which was begun with that unholy massacre on board the Belle Fortune.  I had played straight into Colliver’s hand.

He was in no hurry, but sat and watched me there with those intolerably evil eyes.  His left hand was thrust carelessly into his pocket, and as he tilted back upon the stool and surveyed me, his right was playing with the clasp upon the chest.  As I painfully turned my head a drop of blood came trickling down into my eyes from a cut in my forehead; I saw, however, that the door was bolted.  An empty bottle and a plate of broken victuals lay carelessly thrust in a corner, and a villainous smell from the lamp filled the whole room and almost choked me; but the only sound in the dead stillness of the place was the monotonous tick-tick of my watch as it lay upon the chest.

How long I had lain there I could not guess, but I noticed that the floor slanted much less than when I first scrambled on deck, so guessed that the tide must have risen considerably.  Then having exhausted my wonder I looked again at Colliver, and began to speculate how he would kill me and how long he would take about it.

I found his wolfish eyes still regarding me, and for a minute or two we studied each other in silence.  Then without removing his gaze he tilted his stool forward, slowly drew a short heavy knife from his waist-band, slipped it out of its sheath—­still without taking his left hand from his pocket—­laid it on the table and leant back again.

“I suppose,” he said at last and very deliberately as if chewing his words, “you know that if you attempt to cry out or summon help, you are a dead man that instant.”

“Well, well,” he continued, after waiting a moment for my reply, “as long as you understand that, it does not matter.  I confess I should have preferred to talk with you and not merely to you.  However, before I kill you—­and I suppose you guess that I am going to kill you as soon as I’ve done with you—­I wish to have just a word, Master Jasper Trenoweth.”

From the tone in which he said the words he might have been congratulating me on some great good fortune.  He paused awhile as if to allow the full force of them to sink in, and then took up the Golden Clasp.  Holding the pieces together with the fore-finger and thumb of his right hand, he advanced and thrust it right under my sight—­